AiD lASOCHISM THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HATRED AND CRUELTY This work is issued only for serious adult students of medicine, psycho- logy, sociology and education. Two volumes, full cloth, octavo, table of contents, index and notes. SADISM AND MASOCH- ISM discusses the nature of the abnormal instinct and its many mani- festations, and gives the reader an authoritative explanation of the various impulses, their actions and reactions, together with a careful description of their effects on society and morals. The author amplifies his conclusion with full accounts of case histories. Authorised English Translation by Louise Brink, ph.d. wuLM mm, M SADISM MD MASOCHISM by WILHELM STEKEL, M.D. It is the opinion not only of psycho- analysts but of the most eminent neuro- logists and students of human conduct the world over that Dr. Stekel's great studies analyse the instincts and emo- tions, particularly of sex, more thor- oughly and with greater simplicity and insight than any other work that has ever been written. His work on disorders of the instincts and the emotions, to which belongs Sadism and Masochism, brings to the attention of the English reading public the most important work of its kind that has appeared since Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia-Sexualia. Havelock Ellis' important series. Studies in the Psycho- logy of Sex, and the works of Freud, Moll and Bloch. This work is intended primarily to furnish practitioners with a reliable guide through the difficult realm of instincts and emotions, their disorders and rational psychotherapy. Stekel's technique is not limited to orthodox psychoanalysis. It follows for the most part along original hnes, utilising the elements of other schools of thought. Two volumes £5.0.0 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014 https://archive.org/details/b20442282IVI002 DISORDERS OF THE INSTINCTS AND THE EMOTIONS The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty BY WILHELM STEKEL, M.D. SADISM AND MASOCHISM Two Volumes — Vol. II SADISM AND MASOCHISM The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty By WILHELM STEKEL, M.D. Authorised English Version by LOUISE BRINK, Ph.D. VOLUME TWO VISION VISION PRESS LIMITED Saxone House 74a Regent Street London, Wl % i Printed in the United States of America MCMLXIII CONTENTS OF VOLUME TWO Chapter XI A WOMAN IS BEING CARRIED PAGE Many varieties of the fantasy — Fantasies of carrying a child or of being a riding animal — Case 24: Fantasy of being bridled or of being a dog — Memory of playing horse and dog with father — Degradation of self to animal, bipolar contrast to exaltation of woman — Statements by Rousseau and Musset — Case 25 : Anxiety and heart parapathy — Heart trouble simulated at first in army, when in difficulty with superiors — Recollection of father's finan- cial complaints — Of anal gratification on part of father — Mas- turbatory pleasure in climbing pole — Riding upon schoolmates — Masturbation upon bag of flour — Frightened at possible results of masturbation — Well and successful in army — But fear of dying away from home — First palpitation in presence of woman in cafe — In business, fear of illness when traveling away from home — Fantasies of humiliating love services — Takes sole care of mother in her illness — Carries her — Reversal of infantile re- lation— Masochist toward woman — Sadist toward father and brothers — Reverses early child situation — Death wishes toward others — Masochism upon primary sadistic disposition — Homo- sexual experiences recalled — Refuge in mother from father's rejection of his love — Father used to carry him on his neck — Fantasy of being woman and submitting to a man becomes through reversal masochistic attitude toward woman — Anxiety, fear of self and of homosexuality — Guilty of separating brother from mother — Greater sense of guilt because of sexual wishes toward dead sister — Libido unmasks itself as punishment . . i Chapter XII A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATHY WITH SA- DISTIC AND PARANOID OBSESSIONS (SUS- PICION OF A BEGINNING SCHIZOPHRENIA) BY DRD. MED. EMIL GUTHEIL Case 26: Impulse to murder wife — Wife unattractive — Mar- ried to have regular sexual object — Wife already pregnant — Fan- tasies himself woman — Would like to kill all women -Marriage Y CONTENTS OF VOLUME TWO parapathic in character— Father's marriage unhappy—Mother bore patient soon after marriage — Early experiences determining sadistic trend — Hatred of father and sister — Doubt of mother's love — Desire to be punished by father — Religious feeling — Pow- erful instinctive life in childhood — Homosexual play — Pathologic character of masturbation fantasies — Incest fantasies turned to masturbation — Sadistic toward newborn sister — Breaks with father after unsuccessful demands for money — Fears woman's dominance over man — After divorce, patient goes back to wife without former obsessive acts — Compulsion element gone from marriage — Primary hate object (father) becomes object of pity — Latent homosexuality diverts libido from feminine object — Masochism develops as product of repressed sadism — Death wish toward sisters compensated by religion — Then identification re- sulting in masochism — Active and passive castration complex — Dream reveals lust-murder fantasy directed to child (sister, wife, daughter?) — Criminal impulse twice comes into action — Will to submission a reaction of conscience — Phylogenetic as well as ontogenetic regression — Summary of analysis: heterosexual (mother fixation), sadistic; homosexual (father fixation), maso- chistic, bring about pathogenic experiences and traumata; per- mutation in the CEdipus situation ; criminal complex nurtured by secret plan to return to father by removal of sister — Bipolar attitude toward analyst — Recognition of murderous impulse brings final improvement Chapter XIII CASE HISTORIES Paraphilia due to suppression of natural disposition — Fixation upon family causes reversal of sexual values — Case 27: Sadistic woman — Periodically leaves home to engage in sadistic practices upon men — Bisexual with strongly marked homosexuality — Con- flict with own masculinity — Cleavage into sadistic and maso- chistic— Parapathics become sadists only from internal conflict — Libido joins itself to the conflict — Instinctive wish behind the masking actions of parapathics — All persons long for some one to divine their secret wishes — Case 28: Spoiled youth, tyrant at home — Expects mother to know his wishes — Scene of hatred — Mother leaves— Son's reaction one of long-continued defiance — Goes abroad— Hatred to mother continues — Sadism a paraphilia of hate toward the loved object— Parapathic fixed upon family — Family stronghold of individuality — Fixation upon it unfits for social life — Sadomasochists attempt to conquer love through CONTENTS OF VOLUME TWO vii FAGB hate; this makes bondage greater — Murder impulse toward love object frequent — Case 29: Obsessive form of relation with pros- titutes as defense against murder impulse — Dreams reveal this impulse — Associations of infantile murder fantasies — Unable to study medicine or to continue in army service — Case 30: Dis- placement of murder wish upon a fowl — Infantile interest in wringing of neck — Case 31 : Symbolic sadistic act in stabbing of sofa — Other indications of sadistic impulse — Intellectual sadism — Other special forms of sadism — Severe parapathy as result of unconscious conflict with sadism — Case 32: Sadistic impulses in early years — severe conflict with masturbation in adolescence — Develops intellectual interests — Hypochondriac regarding phys- ical— Loneliness — Remorse — Effort to lose self in study — Analy- sis shows bondage to sisters, homosexuality, repressed sadism — Case 33: Masochistic fantasies prevent real love — Strong femi- nine disposition — Flight from analysis when incest dream ap- pears— Case 34: Pleasurable sensations as child when brothers whipped — Religious during school life — Physical self-torture jus- tified as religious discipline — Masturbation — Sexual conflict — Depression — Evil conscience from repressed sadism — Case 35 : Inability to concentrate — Impulsive actions — Association with criminals in America — Return to Europe — Obsession of another person suffering — Hatred toward women — Relation with step- sister— Homosexual fantasies — Choking fantasies and sensations — Love toward mother and hatred of stepfather — Necrophiliac fantasies — Hatred toward own father — Sadism from various sources — Case 36: Childish sexuality and animal play — Mastur- bation— Masturbation with books — Religious complex as defense against sadism — Extravagance in love affairs — Hatred toward mother and jealousy of brother — Bipolar attitude toward father — Homosexuality and sadism, narcissism and exhibitionism . 60 Chapter XIV THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST Suicide of analysts — Danger of partial analytic knowledge — Disturbance of useful repression — Inability to recognize one's own motivations — Scotoma regarding sadism — Jealousy in rela- tion to sadism and masochism — Self-love wounded — Case 37: Analyst with antimasochistic attitude — Combats masochistic po- sition of woman — Homosexual impulses transformed into ex- treme heterosexual — Crass egoism in childhood — Homosexual attitude toward father changed to defiance — Autoerotic until thirty — Marriage compact as protection against jealousy and viii CONTENTS OF VOLUME TWO PAGE criminality — Wife's lovers gratify patient's homosexual impulses — Narcotics as defense against criminality and homosexuality — Second woman as intellectual companion — Given to his friend — Parapathic result in all participants— Concealed infantile jeal- ousy—Bizarre results of differentiation from father — Original sadism toward women, masochism toward men — Belief in his- torical mission to free the oppressed— Parent complex always present — Anarchy displacement from individual to social — Pat- ricide dream— Desire for sexual aggression from father trans- ferred to women — Flight from true sexuality — Fantasies of iso- lation and noble-mindedness — Disposition to lust murder changed to opposite — Self-analysis and half analyses cause second re- pression— Confined two years for "dementia prascox" — Analysis after dismissal — Progress under difficulty from external interven- tion— World War — First, sadistic enthusiasm — Hard and faith- ful work in hospitals — Death prevents completion of analysis — Superficial analyses the patient's undoing 126 Chapter XV SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION Feeling of guilt leads to many follies — Case 38: Professor of philology — Position lost because of "paranoia" — Fear of stu- dents' insults — Vulgar letters received, discovered to be written by patient himself — Fear of poisoning — Father morose; finally interned — Patient's sense of sexual inferiority before father — Incestuous attitude toward mother — Atheistic externally, very religious internally — Childish cruelty — Cruelty in sexual interest — Childish sexual experience with filthy servant — Dirt complex — Death thoughts — Toward analyst, when secret life plan touched — Passion directed toward sister — Partial analysis — Enthusiasm for pedagogic use of it — Only lifted barriers without destroying unconscious purposes — Dreams reveal exhibitionistic desires to- ward students — Feeling of inferiority and sadism connected — Behind self-accusation and self-mutilation, consciousness of guilt — Case 39 (Heinz Hartmann) : Self-blinding as reaction to child- hood memories — Mother's sensuality — Child's early sexuality — Other instances of blindness as talion — Lust murder behind other impulses of patient — Pedophilia as possible identification with mother 161 CONTENTS OF VOLUME TWO ix Chapter XVI ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHIST PAGE Masochistic will to be sick — Flight from love due to fixation upon infantile ideal — Bipolar attitude toward life — Vacillation as result — Case 40: Extreme masochist — Objects, women with large buttocks — Doubt of treatment — Fear of disillusionment — Masochistic desire defense against inability to love — Fixation upon mother — Cardiac parapathy as reaction of moral ego — Dream shows paraphilia as self-protection — Bipolar attitude to- ward persons in authority — Sexual plan of life bound with sister — Castration ideas — Early associations with female buttocks — Denial of love atonement for hatred toward family — Anal fan- tasies— Coprophiliac thinking — Unwillingness to see truth — Original sadistic attitude toward women — Death wishes toward family — Parapathic amalgamation of death and normal inter- course 213 Chapter XVII CANNIBALISM, NECROPHILISM, AND VAMPIRISM These impulses atavistic petrifactions — Appear in parapathic and paralogic reversion — Often as fear and disgust — In fairy tales and sagas — Necrophiliac acts appear under superstition — Herbert Silberer on superstition — Reported cases of such acts pertain to persons mentally diseased or epileptics — Ordinarily chasm between fantasy and reality — Fantasies of a melancholiac patient (Hilda Milko) — Case 41 (Hareven) : Sadness, profound depression — Ills attributed to death of mother — Dreams indicate sadistic basis of parapathy — Prostitute complex — Father-mother fixation — Incorporation of love object (brother) — Death wishes toward mother — Castration complex — Disillusionment in love and fantasies of revenge — Case 42 : Impotence from inhibition of sadistic impulses — Sexually excited at funerals — Sodomy and sadism toward animals (Kothe) — Case 43: Medical student — Sadistic pleasure in menstrual blood — Necrophiliac tendencies in dissecting room — Necrophiliac tendencies after death of loved person — Case 44 (Zygmund Siegel) : Persistent vomiting of widow — Necrophiliac wish-fulfillment dream — Case 45 (Span- iard) : Grave robbery and necrophiliac acts — Probably in epi- leptic seizures — Case 46 (Miroslav Schlesinger) : Severe conflict between sexuality and religiousness — Christ parapathy — Necro- philiac fantasies — Bipolarity in Christ parapathy — Sexuality as- sociated with graveyard — Case 47: Necrophiliac source of fear X CONTENTS OF VOLUME TWO PAGE of dead bodies— Interest in funerals— Case 48 (Epaulard) : Necrophilia and vampirism — Sexualism infantilism in slightly imbecile person— Epaulard upon necrophilia— Cases of canni- balism, etc. (Gross's Archiv) — Maupassant and cannibalism (Fillet)— Case 49 (Graven) : Patient of Indian blood— Idea- tional vampirism— Developed out of hatred of world for harsh treatment— Disappointed in father's afYection— Wretched mar- riage— Fantasies occupied with blood; with dead bodies — Sadistic sexual fantasies — Extreme satyriasis of husband — Vampirism from family history and social situation— Extravagant sexual fantasies of husband— Occupational class of necrophiliacs re- ported by Epaulard — Case of gravedigger as necrophiliac (Hulst)— Case 50 (Missriegler) : Journal of a well-known writer containing sadistic and necrophiliac fantasies — Gruesome case of Haarmann 248 Chapter XVIII THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX AND ITS ANALYTIC TREATMENT Epilepsy as psychogenic disorder manifesting strong crimi- nality— Psychotherapeutic investigation of epileptic symptom complex — Differential diagnosis of epilepsy — Various opinions — Descriptions of epileptic character: Aschaffenburg, Kraepelin, Redlicli Maeder, White and Jelliffe, Bleuler, Bianchi, Clark — Criticism of Clark — Redlich on epileptic reaction — Cestan: epi- leptic character — Epileptic acts out impulse — Readiness to hate — Spht into life of fantasy and of reality — Physician's task to re- sociahze epileptic — Danger of narcotics — ''Preparatory amnesia" in epileptics — Strong will to sickness — Relatives hinder cure — "Readiness to convulsion" as flight mechanism — Consciously pro- duced attacks — Sexual pleasure in aura — Sexuality and epilepsy (Maeder) — No one type of epileptic fantasy — Regression in all cases — Low instinctive level (Jelliffe and White) — Epilepsy a life reaction — Classification upon degree of regression — Example of second type: attack repeats definite repressed experience — Condensation of motives — Cause is never absent, but must be sought by analysis — Seizures chiefly associated with death, burial, hanging, choking — Carotid symptom — Case 51 (Runge) : Impul- sive attempts at strangulation with pleasurable sensations; other symptoms— Case 52 (Haas) : Girl with choking after mother's dcatli from tuberculosis with fits of suffocation — Other cases of choking associated with orgasm — Accentuation of hand in epi- leptics (Maeder)— Primitive hate reflex— Third type: epileptic experiences trauma of early childhood— Examples— Case 53: CONTENTS OF VOLUME TWO PAGE Official; seizure brings about loss of position — Dreams reveal uterine fantasy — Some patients live dominated by uterine fan- tasy— Frequently castration complex and fellatio fantasy asso- ciated with uterine fantasy — Tongue-biting traceable to this — Epileptic experiences his own death — Experiences a forbidden sexual act — Commits a crime in the seizure — This category con- tains most fearful sadistic paraphilias — Case 54: Severe attacks of rage in presence of loved ones — Excess of affectivity; ex- plodes when specific complex touched: mother complex — Malay running amuck similar — Epileptic symptom complex protective measure against criminal impulse — Mixture of religiousness and criminality — Case 55 (Trousseau) : Husband violently strikes wife in the night — Brutality of epileptic crimes — Murderous im- pulses appear openly in obsessive parapathy — Obsessive para- pathy security against committing crime — Epileptic passes through crime in seizure — Epileptic writers betray sadism in works — Epileptic treatment should tend to analysis and reeduca- tion for work — Patient must recognize psychic forces — Must be directed by own ego — Injuriousness of environment should be removed and epileptic must cultivate independence — Will to be sick recognized only through analysis — Great resistance with silence — Much study needed to determine extent of cure — Ten- dency to deterioration checked and recovery inaugurated — Anal- ysis in institutions — Analysis requires peculiar technic and great intuition — Summary of experience : many cures, many cases im- proved— Epileptic character is parapathic character, with cer- tain traits in greater degree 331 Chapter XIX ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY Case 56: Symptom complained of, urolagnia — Epileptic attacks with attitude toward certain year of childhood — Removal of bromide beneficial at once — Extreme sadistic fantasies alternat- ing with masochistic suffering — Urolagnia offshoot of stronger pathogenic complex — Identification of bodily fluids — Early de- structive impulse — Early recollections of being urinated upon — — Sucking a great role — Conflict between sensuality and piety — Connection with sister complex — Dream of own criminal im- pulses— Sadist from fear of violence changes to masochist — Early memory of killing of pet deer in child's presence — Uterine fantasies — Choice of sadistic words in dream — Externally an atheist; internally devout — Construction of "artificial dream" reveals extravagant fantasy of blood, associated with woman's unfaithfulness — Masochistic attitude toward man (father) — CONTENTS OF VOLUME TWO Overemphasis on possession — Memories of fright — Of much- admired teacher; defiance toward her— Of God's punishment — Revengeful feeling toward brother — First seizure when brother had gone out with sisters — Cannibalistic instincts break through in attacks— Incest dream (brother with mother) preceding attack — Dreams of war and carnage— Child language and sucking movements after attack in twilight state — Fantasies of mother's body— Father castration— Intimidiated attitude changed to energy and joy in life — Summary Chapter XX RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT Analyses demonstrate obsessive character of sadomasochistic parapathy — Wealth of determination of sadistic obsessions — "Death clause" appears as hate — Sadism traceable to family — Sadists incapable of love through infantile fixation — Attitude toward love object bipolar, one current repressed — Part of ha- tred directed within against a component of trisexuality — Pa- tients victims of universal struggle with primitive instincts and impulses — Proof in all nations of the thinness of cultural veneer — Cruelty as found in Russian people (Maxim Gorki) — French barbarities (Albert Londres) — Sadistic manifestations in social movements — Influence of literature upon sadomasochism — EfTect of theater and cinema — Case 57: Serious influence of something told by another child — Evil efifect upon child of witnessing cruelty — Case 58 : Impalement fantasy — Two books read con- taining respectively this and tickling motive — Punishment at school and in family determinants of sadomasochism — ''History of Flogging in Education" (Hermann Schickinger) — Sexual de- sire connected with flogging is rationalized — Flogging prevents free development — Case 59: Victim of stepfather's sadism — Re- sult a broken life — Modern movement toward education through love — Child needs guidance toward community feeling — Punish- ment should give place to enlightenment — Jealousy should not be fostered in family circle — Gives rise to fantasies of revenge — Entire system of punishment a failure — Must avoid excess of affection — Twofold danger in unhappy marriages — Child's hatred also from parents' interference with its sexual life — Right to sexual life within bounds must be respected — Faithlessness of mother and Don Juan nature of father fundamental sources of child's sadomasochism — Problem of sadomasochism a problem of affectivity — Children should be guarded against sexual suspicion — Sadomasochistic paraphilias not congenital, but due to envi- ronment— Sadomasochim a life reaction — Participation of reli- CONTENTS OF VOLUME TWO xiii PAGE gious forces important — Religion and family determine the fate of mankind — Case 60: Sadism precipitated by reading of works on sexology — Cured after analytic reeducation — Case 61 : Agora- phobia as a protection against wish for father — Physical symp- toms identification with Snow White — Pleasure in illness — Case 62: Wakens from sleep with violent pain — Many physi- cians— Operation — Only analysis inquires into sexual condition, in which explanation lies — Case 63 : Unnatural desire for opera- tion as manifestation of masochism — Case 64 (Laignel-Lavastine and Vinchon) : Repeated operations and physical examinations for anxiety states — Sadism of doctors — Sadistic expression dur- ing operations — Original sadism of philanthropists — Sadism source of great works — Cruelty in analysis — Need for physi- cian's analysis — Sadomasochism in ancient world — Behind cul- ture sadistic tendency, but also anagogic tendency — Freedom and health of society needed to diminish individual parapathies — Victory over fear and hatred only through love .... 407 SADISM AND MASOCHISM VOLUME TWO XI A WOMAN IS BEING CARRIED The human hand is the hand of a child ; it grasps only reck- lessly to destroy. It strews the land with wreckage. And what it holds will never be its own ! WiLHELM RaABE. A second fantasy beside the fantasy "A child is being beaten" plays a great role : A woman is being carried. The fantasy appears with many variations. The masochistic man revels in the idea that he is compelled to carry a heavy woman until he almost breaks down under the burden. The sadistic woman may manifest the same wish as a token of her domination and the complete subjection of the man. More rarely one imagines that one is carrying a child, or in associa- tion with zoanthropic ideas there is identification of oneself with a riding animal. The woman in riding clothes with a riding whip belongs to the last-named fantasy. I will mention on this occasion the not unusual identification of a man with a dog which is harshly treated by a woman. This idea, too, may find outlet in the wish to carry a woman. One might trace this fantasy to the reversal of actual infantile situations. Children are carried around by adults, and exchange \ of roles is a daily occurrence in the paraphilia. Nevertheless, complicated conditions are often brought to light, as the next case will reveal to us. Case Number 24. Mr. A. V. has the fantasy that he is being bridled like a horse and will perhaps be used for riding. He may be led by a man, who may so strike him with a whip that he causes I 2 SADISM AND MASOCHISM him no pain. He also has the desire to run around in the room and bark Hke a dog. He once carried out such a scene in a brothel and wanted to proceed with the game until he could in fun bite his partner in the foot. He cried : "I will bite ; I will bite." He must have played his part very naturally, for his partner, a young and still inexperienced prostitute, began to scream and ran from the room. Her master came then and created a great scandal for the bashful man. Since this attempt, he has given up the realization of his fantasies. He came to think, through reading one of my articles, that this morbid inclination must be connected with events in his childhood. He remembers that he used his father as a horse, hitched him up, and also urged him gently with the whip to run faster. He knows also quite definitely that his father often played the part of a dog for him and threatened to bite him. Now and then he would take the child's foot into his mouth and pretend he was going to bite. . . . A further analysis is for various reasons impossible. But we see clearly how the memory is fixed upon the play with the father and carried over to the woman. It is a stubborn regres- sion to the infantile, which in such cases manifests itself as obsessive act. To this category belong the ridiculous case of the man who goes to a brothel to have the prostitute stick a feather into his anus and then cries out cock-a-doodle-doo ; the man who makes all sorts of childish noises and then begins to miaow ; the case of a man who creeps around the room on all fours, growls like a bear, and must be beaten on the nates with a stick until ejac- ulation results with a great orgasm. The degradation of one's own person into the animal, the instinctive, follows as the bipolar contrast to the elevation and deification of the woman. On the one hand purity, absence of sexuality, divinity; on the other uncleanness, animal instinct, plunge into hell. The polar tension between man and woman is increased, overstrained. It rests upon the infantile proto- type, ''mother and son" or "father and daughter.'* Reverence is mingled with love. The lower the masochist stands, the greater becomes the feeling of the difiference, which finds its sharpest expression in the picture, "God and beast." This the reason that the number of copro- and urolagnists among masochists is so great. Despite this representation of the A WOMAN IS BEING CARRIED 3 bestial in the specific masochistic fantasy, the masochism serves an ascetic tendency and makes its bearer in these forms also psychically impotent ; that is, actually chaste. No one has more beautifully expressed this than Jean Jacques Rousseau, who in one passage in his Confessions speaks as follows concerning his masochism : ''Even when I had passed beyond the years of childhood, this ever-persisting, strange taste (for flagellation!), which drove me to what was injurious and to folly, preserved for me the purest morals, while it seems as if it would have robbed me of these." He stresses the fact in another place that his paraphilia guarded him from women: ''Thus it not only happened that with a very ardent temperament already inclined to sensual pleasure I spent my youthful years without desiring or know- ing other gratification than that to which Mile. L. had inno- cently led me, but when as the years passed I became a man, that which might have been my destruction became my preser- vation." We shall find, therefore, among all these masochists the tendency to degrade themselves and achieve the apotheosis of the beloved woman, which only serves to increase the distance between themselves and the sexual object and make possession of the latter more difficult ; they avoid it and deem it unneces- sary. They find their pleasure in worship. It can be easily demonstrated that this ascetic tendency arises from religious motives and so must naturally lead to a merging of the ideal with divinity. We have been able to point again and again to the significance of the "prostitute complex" and its overcompensa- tion. The prostitute is often made a saint. I will call attention to the characteristic passage in Alfred Musset's Confessions of a Child which indicates this. "My passion for my loved one had become something quite unmanageable and my life had taken on from it something monk- ish-savage. I will adduce but one example of this" . . . and now he relates how he carried upon his heart a miniature of her set with spikes so that he might feel pain with every movement. The very emphasis of the monkish-savage shows the strong intermingling of religion and erotism peculiar to the maso- chist. Merzbach rightly lays stress upon this. He says : 4 SADISM AND MASOCHISM "Next to masochism comes religious submission to the will of God, being absorbed in love to Him and in humiliation before Him through asceticism, penitence, self-torture, even through self- mutilation and through the bliss of death. The life of martyrs, who kill the lust of the flesh, gives evidence of this ; the flagellants of the Middle Ages prove it, as do the manifold religious sects which are met with still to-day in Russia as the Doukhobors and Skoptsi, who, like the howling dervishes and the invulnerable fakirs of the Orient, inflict pain upon themselves, injure, and maim themselves out of love to God, who therefore opens to them and their sinful brethren the gates of heaven/' Such religious ecstasies appear at times to be considerably stronger than the sexual, inasmuch as the masochist would rarely dare permit himself such severe injury if at the appropriate mo- ment he did not feel it as ecstasy, but he would attempt to soften or to escape them. Let us turn now to the discussion of a case which will picture for us in very characteristic fashion the apotheosis of the woman in connection with her degradation and will strikingly illustrate the function of masochism as avoidance of coitus. Case Number 25. Mr. M. L, a manufacturer, thirty-four years of age, complains of frightful attacks of anxiety, which make life a burden to him and make it impossible to remain in a large city. He suffers a heart parapathy, which manifests itself most unexpectedly. A feeling of anxiety suddenly overtakes him upon the street, his heart begins to beat wildly, and he feels death approaching. "Now you are going to die!" an inner voice says to him. His senses seem about to leave him, the pulse becomes rapid, cold sweat breaks out, the eyes protrude rigidly from their sockets. As soon as the doctor arrives and holds his hand, all the disquieting symptoms disappear. The physician must sit by him for a half to a full hour, until he is wholly calm. These attacks appear also at night and more likely so. The doctor may not go far from his home without leaving word where he can be found. When the physician went for a vacation into the Alps, the patient journeyed with him, did not permit him to go out alone for a second. If the patient went to the closet, the physician had to wait outside. This disagreeable illness prevented this gifted manufac- turer from going to the metropolis and forced him to remain in a small spot where his abilities could not develop. But he was so A WOMAN IS BEING CARRIED 5 used to the physician that he was no longer able to live without him. He suffered much more anxiety in Vienna and did not trust himself to go out unaccompanied by the doctor, while in his small native town he had a certain radius of action which he might traverse without fear. If he passed beyond this zone, it meant the development of the anxiety. The entire illness was, as in all these cases, fear of being dominated by the fear. His whole day was spent in dread that he might suffer another attack. The patient remarked in regard to his sexual life that he had lived now for five years in total abstinence, because he feared that intercourse might do him harm, and because he might be seized with an attack while at a brothel. The physician would then have to be summoned to the brothel, the whole town would know it, and he would be an object of ridicule. He has no relations at all with women ; his disorder fills the entire day so that no time is left for women. . . . We have before us a strong, Herculean man, the picture of physical health. The first task was to make the patient independ- ent of his physician. He would have to stay in Vienna, submit himself to the analytic treatment, and the physician ought, indeed had, to return home. The patient would not hear of this. He wanted to come to me every Sunday in company with the doctor, which I naturally had to refuse. Finally he went home with the physician. . . . After a week he came back. The good doctor, who every year earned a large sum of money with this patient, had allowed him no rest and had also given the patient to under- stand that he was not willing to put his whole life at the service of one person ; that he, too, must have a certain freedom, and so on. . . . He now proposed putting the patient into a sanatorium, where there were always doctors at his disposal, and to hand him over in Vienna to my treatment. I will anticipate by saying that this seemed to the patient an insoluble problem. He stopped in the sanatorium without having taken his luggage with him. But it stood ready at home. He was so convinced that he could not live without his physician that he had left everything behind. He did not have his baggage sent until fourteen days later. During this time he was already suffi- ciently free from his anxiety. After four weeks he went about Vienna without fear, and in two weeks more the treatment was at an end. Before I go into the important sexual history of this man, I will relate the genesis of his heart trouble. He was physically a per- 6 SADISM AND MASOCHISM fectly sound man. He had a satisfactory position in the army. Then came difficulties with one of his superiors, which might have cost him his post and his freedom. He simulated at that time heart disease, was so greatly excited that the regimental physician believed it was real. It was the first time in his life that he had taken refuge in illness. Now the path for further parapathic disorder was open. After this he wanted to be re- leased from the army and gave heart defect as his reason for being unable to serve longer. He was so stirred up after any excitement and by his frequent indulgence in black coffee that his pulse was accelerated, reaching as high as 140 to 160 beats a minute. He was given special privileges on account of heart weakness. Then the fear arose that he actually had a heart defect. He was tor- tured by the fixed idea that he had an unsound heart! He was afraid, however, to be examined by the physicians. He could not fae prevailed upon to seek a specialist for fear he would hear his death sentence. He was brought with difficulty to a clever doctor who confirmed the fact of a severe "cardiac neurosis." He then found his physician and would not hear of any other. No one but his physician understood him, and he has only his own doctor to thank that he is still alive. The illness began therefore with simulation and out of his cun- ning game with his superiors a severe illness developed ! ^ The origin of this cardiac parapathy from a situation lightly conceived is of great significance from the medical point of view. It is not the first case of this kind that I have been able to observe. I remember a man who enacted before those in authority over him and his father a severe gastric disorder. He, too, had to deceive the doctors in order to obtain for him- self a longer leave of absence. But when the physicians began to have faith in his statements, he commenced to doubt his own game and considered himself a very sick man. He first repre- sented himself as ill, and then grew into the illness. These facts are of the very greatest importance in judging of simula- tions of so-called "accident neuroses." The simulation of a dis- ease is always, certainly, of great danger for the masochistic psyche. The simulant comes to know the delight of being ill, the pleasure and pride in the disorder become ever stronger, and finally the illness is incurable. A WOMAN IS BEING CARRIED 7 I will now give the exact description of the difficulty in his own words : I am a manufacturer, thirty-four years old ; unmarried ; have suffered for perhaps the last ten to twelve years from anxiety states and palpitation of the heart, which naturally hinder me greatly in the carrying on of my business. My mother died in her eighties of pneumonia; was ill of diabetes during the last fifteen years. My father is living, is nearly ninety, relative vigorous, mentally very clear ; so far as I know has never been ill. I come therefore from a healthy, long-lived family. My father conducted a fairly large banking business in the country, for which, however, he did not possess the necessary capital ; was always involved therefore far beyond his powers, and was glad to place his cares upon various members of the family. He had the habit, further, of depicting his worries, no matter whether they were these business ones or those of a private nature, in far more gloomy colors than was in accordance with the facts. Thus, for example, I can remember quite well that I had to share these anxieties when I was a child of three or four years, inasmuch as I was present on many occasions when he was paint- ing his situation to my mother or the older brothers and sisters in the most glaring light, only to have all the members of the family share in the demands which the situation made. The nursery in our home adjoined my parents' sleeping room, and frequently at night I had to hear my father describing to my mother his precarious financial position. On such days I always went to school much troubled, and even during the lesson hour I would think : "Dear Lord, why do you not help my poor parents?" Or if I heard of any one who had a prosperous busi- ness my first thought invariably was : "Why have not my parents the good fortune to have so good a business, so that they can be free from these everlasting cares and sleepless nights?" I might mention at this place that outside of the house my father was a very agreeable person ; and especially at the tavern was he a wel- come guest because of his sociability and because he gave no sign there of his cares even in times of the greatest financial distress. At home, however, it was quite the opposite ! Neither my brothers and sisters nor I had really much of our youth. Our father permitted us neither to play nor to romp in the streets, as our companions did, nor to go on the ice or to go 8 SADISM AND MASOCHISM coasting like the other children. Once we received a whipping because we tore our trousers, another time it was our shoes, and so it went. There was always commotion and whipping ! I come to the most important memory of my life ! Only I must not leave one thing unmentioned, for I cannot measure the importance of this event. Whether this was in a dream or the thing really happened I cannot definitely say ; in any case, I still see this occurrence before me to-day. It was long before my entrance into the elementary school, and I presume therefore that I was about three years old. My father took me with him into the bath, where I bathed with him in the same tub. After his bath he had himself licked on the anus, by whom I do not know, but in any case by a man; so much has remained in my memory. I can no longer recall what my feeling was at the time when I saw this. But the experience as such is always before my eyes. There were at the time ten brothers and sisters in our home. I was the seventh child. Now after having passed my sixth year I was sent to school. I was a fairly good student. During the recess from ten to half past we were led into the school garden where we could jump and play. It happened there one day that I had climbed the athletic pole, and while I was holding convulsively to the top of the pole I experienced in my organ such "3. feeling of pleasure," so de- lightful and so sweet, that from now on almost every day, when we were taken into the garden, I at once sprang upon some of the climbing poles and clambered about until the "feeling of pleasure" had again come. I cannot say to-day how long I did this, but anyway it lasted a good while. I frequently spent my time at school and even in the first classes with the following fantasy: "I imagined people and especially my circle of acquaintances as if one of them were sitting upon an- other's shoulder (at times I saw in my fantasy one of them sit- ting upon another's head or his face) ; at the bottom, the one with the least means and above, the better-situated ; I mentally pictured my position in this endless ladder as always higher and higher, and, if I remember correctly, this gave me a delightful sensation. I had no intimation at the time of "coitus" itself ; I mean that I did not know how this act took place, for often when I heard pupils of the higher classes talking of it in vulgar terms, I would ponder over it, but could not yet form a correct idea of it. In the third class — therefore about nine years old — ^there was A WOMAN IS BEING CARRIED 9 a whole society of us who produced "the feeHng of pleasure'* by spitting into our hands and rubbing our organ, in part for our- selves, in part for one another, until we obtained the desired result. Riding upon my schoolmates also caused me at that time a sensual gratification. Thus in the third or fourth class at the ele- mentary school, I might have been already ten or eleven years old, I had a fellow pupil who was in everything rather unfairly treated. He was, it is true, a stupid thing and had not very agree- able traits otherwise, and on this account was snubbed by his schoolmates. One day I went to walk in the country with this friend. I spoke of our relative strength with the purpose of get- ting him to let me sit upon his back. While I sat there, I said to myself in my fantasy: "You have to carry me now even if you do not want to," or, better expressed, "You do not want to carry me, but you must." It was not a minute before I was aware of the feeling of pleas- ure. I even believe that I had a seminal discharge at the time. This fellow pupil, who, as I said, was somewhat looked down upon by the other companions of the same age, was glad to have at least my friendship; and this I abused when we went walking, when the above-mentioned occurrence was always repeated. I entered the gymnasium after the twelfth year; when I had failed in the first form, my uncle took me into his business. Here I performed onanism in this manner; I set up a sack of flour or the like in the storehouse, imagined this to be a man on whose back I seated myself, and did this under the greatest variety of fan- tasies (for example, as above with my schoolmate) until the orgasm again set in. This procedure was repeated daily for a long time, then once a week; if I reproached myself, only once in fourteen days; then again more frequently. I was not yet fourteen years old when I was sent to a trades- man in Vienna as apprentice. I was fitted out very primitively ; my father gave me ten kronen pocket money, wished me very good luck, gave me some good advice; then life began in the great city. At that time there was still no legal regulation of rest on Sunday, and so I was kept hard at work by my employer the week through from five in the morning till eleven at night. Only once in several weeks was permission granted for me to go out Sunday evening after five o'clock. I stuck to this post about a year and a half, during which time I practiced onanism chiefly with the sack of flour, accompanied by the fantasies I have mentioned. I did not lO SADISM AND MASOCHISM feel very contented with this position. I always had the thought before me that I could do something better. I pitied not only myself but every tradesman ; I saw in each individual a tormented slave who as to time had to drudge from early morning until late at night and scarcely earned enough to keep soul and body together. I was just at the point of getting a better position when I was informed by my father that affairs at home had become so much worse that it was impossible for him to remain longer in a small place, and that for this reason he had decided to move to Vienna and set up a shop there for himself. This project was carried out a month later. My father bought a small shop, in which I had once more to go actively to work. My father, brought up from the very beginning in a strictly re- ligious manner, had been in the habit previously of closing his business on Sunday and going regularly to church, but in Vienna he had to give this up, for which he reproached himself most severely and, as was his custom, let his family feel it, too, in so far as he was always mourning and lamenting in our presence that it was no wonder things went so badly with him when he had sinned like this. He himself suffered very much from these con- stant lamentations, was mentally quite upset, and about six weeks before Easter firmly resolved until the holidays at least to live again in his home town. The business was sold within a very short time for a mere song, and we moved to our home, the father financially much worse off than before his first change of resi- dence. He now conducted a small exchange in the same place where a year before he had been the chief banker. A short time after our last moving I became ill, I believe with pneumonia. When I had recovered, I still had a trembling in my feet. If in a sitting position I placed the foot upon its point, a trembling of the entire extremity would begin. I had, I think, already observed this shaking of the feet during my stay in Vienna but had kept quiet about it to spare my parents, especially my mother, whom I loved above all. Yet it concerned me very much. At the instigation of our family physician, I was now to go to a hospital in Vienna; for according to his opinion hospital treat- ment seemed necessary for this disorder. I was fitted out the very next day for the journey. In the railway carriage, I met a Mr. X. This gentleman learned from our conversation that I was going to a hospital and inquired after my trouble, which I de- scribed to him in as much detail as I could, upon which he said A WOMAN IS BEING CARRIED II quietly to me : *'My dear friend, you have indulged too much in onanism, and this is the result; it is nothing to make light of, for it is the beginning of consumption of the spinal cord 1" Then he explained this disease to me in fullest detail. Thus I came to my relatives in Vienna quite crushed and con- sulted at that time Professors Krafft-Ebing, Neusser, and other skillful men, who told me that I was thoroughly healthy. Never- theless, I suffered for some years from this mistaken conception, definitely believed that I had spinal-cord disease, and went to all the doctors in my native city with this idea. For if one or the other declared I was perfectly healthy, I was perhaps at rest ; but in a few days I would again suffer from the false idea; I was always thinking that the physician in question either had not taken sufficient trouble with the examination or that he did not under' stand the case, and I simply went to the next one. I remember on this occasion an incident at the Neusser clinic. I was asked by an assistant during the consultation if I sometimes had palpitation of the heart. In my inexperience, I requested the gentleman to tell me what the palpitation was like; perhaps, I thought, I had had such beating of the heart already without knowing it. He said to me : "Then you very decidedly have not had it, or you would know what it is.'* I went home that time at peace, but since then have thought of the palpitation of the heart together with the spinal-cord disease. I suffered perhaps three years from these imagined ills. I was perfectly well from my seventeenth to my twentieth year. I practiced onanism during these years also — I could not leave it alone in spite of all my good resolutions. Now I came into the army, where I likewise sought sexual gratification in onanism, but was, notwithstanding, perfectly well for two years and a half, never once fagged out ; the most severe exercises did not cause me the least difficulty. I must confess, however, that I often thought, "If only I do not die here in the army," or 'Tf I merely knew certainly that in case of illness they would send me home to be taken care of by my own people." After about two years and a half I made the acquaintance of a comrade by the name of Y. I tried like every one else to escape military service through some means or other, for as much as I had enjoyed the army and army life at first, just so disagreeable was it to me later. Merely to refer to one slight instance, I mention that in the last year of service I dreamed once or twice that I had recently been enlisted, and I suffered so much during this dream, moaned and wept so sorely, that my comrades were seriously 12 SADISM AND MASOCHISM concerned about me. I had this dream once several years after my discharge, whereby again I was in great distress. My distress was so great merely from knowing: "You must under any condition remain still another year," that I often envied the cripple upon the street. And yet I had the most satisfactory period of service that could be conceived. I enjoyed in greatest measure the favor of those over me, had undergone not the slight- est punishment, had saved by means of an additional income several hundred kronen; but notwithstanding all this during the latter period I was continually occupied with the thought: "How can I get away from here?" One day G. told me that in his company a man had also wanted to get out of the army at any price and had drunk a great deal of black coffee ; he then presented himself to the doctor of the regiment and was recommended by him for honorable discharge on account of palpitation of the heart. I seized upon this means, drank at breakfast and after the noon meal perhaps a half a liter of coffee, and without feeling the slightest ill effect went after a time to the regimental physi- cian and complained of pain in the region of the heart. I men- tion once more that in reality I had no distress but was merely attempting to lie out of military duty. The regiment physician, Dr. D., examined me pretty thoroughly and finally said to the chief physician, K., who was present, "Yes, there is something! The matter is not so simple !" upon which the chief physician examined me and said that he could find nothing. The regiment doctor examined me again, confirmed his first diagnosis, and gave me some medicine, of which I was to take at first three drops a day, increasing to twenty drops and then dimin- ishing the dose to three drops. I heard from the regimental physician the word "heart neurosis,'* which disturbed me, for I had seen once in a wax model a heart diseased from "sclerosis," and now I kept on imagining my hence- forth diseased heart in such a condition. My older sister had died, perhaps six months before, so sudden a death that I could only explain it to myself as paralysis of the heart. Since then I have been thinking all the time that I should end like that and for this reason wanted more than ever to be sent home from military service, in order that in such a case I might at least die at home. I sat one day, it might have been about four- teen days after the consultation I have described, in the afternoon at the coffeehouse; at the table near by sat a variete soubrette A WOMAN IS BEING CARRIED 13 whom I had frequently seen on the stage, and who had at such times pleased me very much, although she was married and no longer young. On this day and in this situation I was suddenly taken with an uncomfortable sensation in the region of the heart, which frightened me very much, for at the moment I saw before me the dreaded sudden death in a strange place — immediately thereafter I had for the first time palpitation of the heart, which still more strengthened me in my assumption that this was now my end. It is interesting that a song which the soubrette sang in the Variety starts these unpleasant sensations even to-day, and that formerly when this song or only its melody occurred to me I was likely to have a heart attack. That is, I see before me with this song the whole situation when I had my first palpitation. I went at once to the barracks near by and asked the inspection officer to send for a physician. It was about an hour before he came ; he had me put in the fatigue room, where cold applications were made to the heart. Finally, after three to four days, I was transferred to the garrison hospital, from which after some days I received a leave of absence of eight weeks, of which I imme- diately availed myself. I had scarcely reached home when my mother fell ill of a severe acute disease, during which I self-sacrificingly cared for her quite alone until she had completely recovered. In the meantime, my furlough was at an end, and after returning to the colors I asked my regimental physician for a complete discharge, for my condi- tion was in no wise improved. This request was granted, and I was permanently discharged with honorable mention. I was now twenty-four years old and so far had never had sexual intercourse with a woman, but had always sought gratifi- cation in onanism. After fourteen days of rest at home, I took a position in a new factory, where I worked first in the office for a year and then was to be sent on the road. The firm moved its headquarters to Prague, from which place I worked exclusively, traveling for it. I covered merely the surrounding region and in such a way that I could spend the night at my home in Prague, inasmuch as staying overnight in a strange city, even when I had been in the place twenty to thirty times, was always hard for me ; and when it was unavoidable, I was always happy if I found an ac- quaintance in the same hotel. Almost always when I had to spend the night in another town I was taken with the most acute 14 SADISM AND MASOCHISM heart attacks. I went away relatively at peace on the days when, according to program, I was to be in Prague again in the evening ; the journey presented great difficulties on those days when I had to remain away overnight. I had, moreover, for years to hide this state of things as care- fully as possible from my chiefs, for I was afraid that otherwise I should be considered inferior. I made the greatest sacrifices merely to be able to spend the night in my own home in my accustomed surroundings. It was not an uncommon occurrence to have to leave at four in the morning and not to return until midnight, to start again the next day at four. Another thing is interesting, that during the journey to any place I would often have these anxiety attacks, which would be followed at once by the palpitation of the heart, while on the return journey from this spot to Prague, that is the return home, I had no difficulty what- ever. And one thing more, if I were traveling in the direction of my native place, then, too, I never suffered; on the contrary, I felt in such instances very well. I have forgotten to state one thing, which perhaps is not alto- gether unimportant as regards the illness itself. As I have already mentioned, I always felt very well when during my sojourn in Prague I was journeying in the direction of my own home. This permitted a decision to ripen in me to leave my position and es- tablish myself in my home town, from which place I should have only such a radius to traverse which would permit me to be at home every night, presuming that in this way my shattered nerves would be restored. Alas ! I was mistaken in this assumption, for after a short time, on every occasion when I had to travel from my own town to any other place I had the same feeling as at the time when I went from Prague to any spot which was in an opposite direction to my home. Only with this difference, that at the time when I still had my position in Pragu**. I had to go in such cases, because otherwise I was afraid of losing my position, but feared still more that my employers might thus come to know my condition ; while at home in these instances I often failed to make the trip. The conditions manifested themselves in the following manner: I frequently had something to do at some place near my own city, went to the station intending to proceed to this place, even procured my ticket ; but scarcely would the train have drawn up before the station when I would be seized by the anxiety, would already see myself lying there helpless in the compartment, or see A WOMAN IS BEING CARRIED 15 myself in the same situation at the place to which I was about to travel. The consequence was a violent palpitation of the heart. I would hastily take my traveling case and try to regain my home, attracting as little attention as possible, usually letting my ticket drop, because this happened so often that I could no longer trouble the ticket agent with the refund. But I would scarcely have my back turned to the station when I would in a few minutes feel quite well again. Often I regretted that I had been so wanting in energy. At times I had to go in spite of this state of mind, and it is worth mentioning that in such cases I did not have the least difficulty on the way back. My condition has grown worse in the last two years in that I have not, generally speaking, been able to travel at all ; or if fre- quently I undertook trips which simply could not be postponed I always had to be accompanied by my family physician. While formerly I had been in the employ of some one else, relatives gave me the means soon to establish a small factory in my own town, for which I then traveled myself. I succeeded in in- troducing my products throughout the surrounding region, so that materially I am very well situated. I might be a rich man, if I had complete freedom of movement. But I tremble at the thought of leaving my small native city, for the horror of all horrors for me would be to die or be ill in a strange place, if no one of my family were there. I must have some one near me who cares for me ; I must have my old family physician with me. I cannot live among strangers ! I am under the spell of the familiar, and I know of no other person who so clings to his own home environ- ment as I do. But only on account of the people who know me and whom I know. The thought is pain to me that I might lie ill in an unfamiliar room where no one knows me. I should prefer suicide to this. Anything that has its origin in my native place and from my childhood has a tenfold value for me. All that lies outside is practically worthless to me. ... I am a slave to the old and to the family." This phenomenon, which we have found so frequently in the discussion of sexual infantilism, **the fear of what is strange" (neophobia) must be supplemented by a sexual life similarly based upon infantile factors. The patient shows that delight and pleasure in illness which drives the individual into masochism and fixes him upon masochistic activity. Now it was not easy to obtain from this patient the completely i6 SADISM AND MASOCHISM truthful history of his sexual life. The patient believed at the beginning of the treatment that his sexual life was normal and had nothing to do with his illness, which was a pure "cardiac neurosis." But gradually the entire clinical picture was disclosed, and therewith a form of masochism came to light that belongs to the most interesting which I have had occasion to investigate. He admits finally that he still practices onanism at times and that he is of the opinion that his disorder is connected with onan- ism. How often has he sworn to give up the masturbation and to be really abstinent. Many physicians have called his attention to the injuriousness of the practice, and yet he has not been able to stop it. He has indulged in it since he was a child ; then there was a period from approximately his twenty-fourth to his twenty- ninth year in which he regularly had intercourse with women. He became impotent, gave up women, and satisfies himself from time to time by onanism. He is dominated during this by a fantasy which he has never yet spoken of to any one. He imagines that he has to carry a woman, or that some one else is carrying a woman and he may look on. He most prefers the fantasy that another person is carrying the woman while he performs cunnilingus upon her. It is always the idea of the woman who is being borne which excites his fantasy to the highest pitch. Masochistic ideas often rise. The woman desires humiliating love service, wants to be kissed on the anus, or he must lick her buttocks. At times there is a whole series of such women being carried by men, which he sees before him, when the bearer of the woman standing just before him performs cunnilingus upon her, so that a sort of serial dance takes place (symplegma !). He has already several times tried to enter into a permanent relationship with a girl and has been engaged three times. Each time he drew back, and his "heart neurosis" gave him a welcome excuse. He could not drag a fine girl into his misery. He always imagined that he would carry the girl and let her be carried by some one else, which then led to onanistic acts. His fear and his parapathy protected him from the brothel. He was afraid he would suffer an attack there, and the whole city would learn of it. Thus he has been able to remain pure and to devote his entire love . . . to his mother. He knows no other concern, aside from his "heart neurosis," than his mother's health. He has watched over her as if she were the child and he the mother. He entirely reversed the relationship. His mother had to remain in bed in the morning A WOMAN IS BEING CARRIED 17 until he brought her coffee. She had gastric trouble, suffered from an ulcus ventriculi, and had to adhere to a rigid diet. He at- tended very strictly to it and would let no one else bring her her food. He still had five brothers, whom he knew how to remove from the mother's spell. The mother was massaged after break- fast. This he took charge of himself. He liked to play the physician and especially with the mother. He gave the irriga- tions, administered the enemas, and carried out the stools during the severe illness, bathed the mother, and never left her side. The whole town knew of his touching love for his mother and he stood therefore high in the estimation of all mothers, who praised him as a model son. Six months ago his mother was ill with pleurisy. He did not leave her bed ; for fourteen days he did not take off his clothes; he treated her according to his own principles with cold compresses, even ignored the directions of the tried, and to him indispensable, physician, if they did not please him. He prevailed upon his brothers to have an expensive specialist brought from Vienna and severed his relations with one brother because he considered this measure unnecessary and would not share the cost. He forbade his mother to have anything to do with this son, and he produced the most violent scenes when she pleaded for him and expressed the wish to see him again. He literally carried his mother on his hands! He carried her from her bed, into her bed, or upon the sofa ; he would most gladly have carried her over every street which was uneven or dirty. As I called his attention to the correspondence of his actions with his fantasy, he defended himself and said he never had a sexual feeling in connection with them and strenuously avoided dragging his mother into the circle of his fantasies. Now we very frequently observe with parapathics that they completely asexuahze the object of their desire, lay upon it the interdict of disgust or of sexual indifference in order to deceive themselves and those about them as to their true feelings. We see at any rate that in the fantasy it is a matter of reversal of an infantile relationship. He was carried about a great deal on his mother's hands, because he was rachitic and often ailing. Now he changes the situation about. He carries his mother on his hands and repays her all the love which he has received from her. We now understand his parapathy thus, as if it should read: I will be a child again ! He coddles the child in himself and takes care that it shall not become a man. He has been impotent for i8 SADISM AND MASOCHISM five years, that is, not a man, and he avoids all vc^omen. His illness already shows the infantile trait ... the craving for sym- pathy and the exaction of other people's participation through the attacks. His mother is now an old woman well advanced in years, the patient objects; but he has to admit that he revealed a strong gerontophilia even many years ago. He sought formerly at the brothel the very oldest prostitute and would to-day rather talk with old women than with girls. It is of greatest significance that in his fantasies very often old women . . . play a part. This does not deny the fact that he is also much interested in children, young girls, who are not yet mature and whom also he would like to carry around. This phenomenon is the bipolar opposite of his gerontophilia. It is always the infantile which is represented through it. He is the child with the old person, the old person with the child. It is always a matter of an older person and a child. This is the fundamental principle of his fantasies. The relation to his mother finds an interesting complement in that toward his father. The objection might be made toward an erotic conception of this relationship that it has to do with a strongly accentuated childish love. If this were so, the father would be enjoying the same treatment. But here we come upon something new in our discussions. He is a masochist. Certainly. But only toward women and the female sex. With men he is a sadist. We have therefore before us a patient who has a double atti- tude: a masochistic one tozvard women and a sadistic one toward men. Let us look somewhat more closely at his relation to his father. His father is supported by him and now, since the bank- ruptcy of the last exchange house, carries on a small business in antiques. His son has strictly forbidden it. It might injure his reputation. The old man, however, wants to have his own money and takes pleasure in the trade. This causes numerous conflicts at home; the son screams at the father and the mother has to intervene. Furthermore, the old man secretly speculates in the stock market and has in this way now and then a larger income, so that he becomes independent. Then he puts on airs, rides through the town in a fiacre, which brings his son to despair. He then waits until the evil day comes when his father is again thrown upon him and has to come to him because he is in need of money. These are fearful days for the poor father. He has to listen to a long lecture ; his heedlessness is held up to him. He had it so A WOMAN IS BEING CARRIED 19 comfortably; he could live peaceably from the support which he, the rich son, grants to his parents. But the father has no con- sideration for the mother's illness, whom he will still bring to her grave. So he manifests in his relation to his father, too, the reversal of the infantile situation. The father reaps what he has sown.^ Thus his sadism expends itself upon his father, who for a long time held him in such stern control. But fearful are the scenes when the son thinks the father has no regard for the mother's health. The father is tortured most through the mother. Indeed, the patient has thought out an ingenious system which permits him to harass the father from the noblest motives of filial love. Smok- ing first of all. The father likes to smoke his English pipe, cannot go to sleep if he has not smoked, must smoke after every meal. This has been strictly forbidden by the son since the mother's pneumonia. The father must leave the house even in the winter to smoke his pipe outside. Once he smoked it in the entrance hall. The son was supposed to be away at business until later. But he came home earlier and found his father with the pipe in the hall. It was during the mother's convalescence after the severe pleurisy. He threw himself upon the father, tore his pipe from his hands, flung it against the wall, and screamed so that the neighbors flocked together, and the poor sick mother came hurry- ing from her bed. He then attributed her being worse not to his behavior but to the smoking. He wanted at that time to fall upon the father and beat him. But the father uttered a fearful curse : God would punish him for treating his father so badly and he would be ill-treated by his own child. He is terribly superstitious like all parapathics. He believes that he is guilty of the death of a number of people. If he wishes any one's death, it is sure to come sooner or later. He has cursed others and wished them serious illness. That, too, has come to pass. This belief in the omnipotence of one's own thought is a form, like the infantile delusion of greatness, which ascribes to itself supernatural powers, and it has continued to a later age. He is lord of life and death. But he betrays his cruel attitude, which can be assumed from his interest in nursing the sick and in all sorts of injuries. Pity and Samaritanism are often only culturally transformed cruelty. He can look upon all kinds of wounds, he can bandage them, treat them ; he is concerned for all 20 SADISM AND MASOCHISM the dead and seriously ill in the small city; he visits the people before death and lets them die after a definite time. .... His sadism gives also many evident signs. He liked to go as a boy to the slaughterhouse, where he watched an uncle sticking the pigs, which caused him pleasurable sensations. He was always playing with the thought how it would be with him if the other brothers and sisters died, and he brooded over all sorts of plans to get them out of the way. His masochism has also been developed upon a primary sadistic disposition. Investigation of his repressed homosexuality brings surprising material. At first he does not want to know anything about it. He has a fearful disgust when he hears of such filthy doings. One ought to lock up all such swine and punish them severely. But gradually he admits that he has a certain aesthetic interest in good-looking men. Behind this aesthetic interest there usually lurks a sexual one. At last he recalls a number of homosexual experiences, partly with his brothers, partly with his play- mates. . . . The father, too, played a great role in his childhood, and he originally loved him much more than the mother. His father had often taken him into his bed, always went with him to bathe, taught him, occupied himself very much with him. The boy did not concern himself much about his mother. Then suddenly there came a period in which he lost all love for his father. His attitude toward his mother is to be attributed in part to defiance and serves in part to provoke the father, offend him, show him that one does not need him. We come now to the discussion of the important mfantile scenes. It does violence to our feeling to believe that he actually experienced the event mentioned. His father had actually had an anilingus performed upon him ? Yet according to what I have ob- served and the confessions which I have received from men, I cannot dismiss it a priori, I know many men who are so under the dominion of this paraphilia that they have renounced every other sexual activity. Why should not his father have his sexual idiosyncrasies? This paraphilia is in and for itself not much more unusual than any other. One hears but little of its existence be- cause men are ashamed to confess this sort of sexual activity (active or passive). But even if we take this memory as a fantasy, it expresses a strong desire : I should like to grant my father this friendly service. A WOMAN IS BEING CARRIED 21 The folk tongue very strikingly calls this form of paraphilia "to like some one" [jemanden gem habcn]. You may like me, is the request for this act.^ A far more important fantasy, however, is concealed behind his conscious heterosexual one; he will not admit it to himself: He would Hke to render his father this kindly service ; he would like to do everything for him. He loves his father and takes refuge in love to his mother out of defiance and because of rejected love. His father has another favorite son. This he evidently cannot forgive him. But we see once more how important it is not to take even the manifest incestuous attitude as a finished fact, but to seek after a parapathic attitude. He certainly has a strong in- clination toward his mother. But he takes advantage of this fondness; he exalts it at the father's expense as if he would say: "See how I idolize my mother ! How tender I can be when I love ! All that you have forfeited !" The father used to carry him on his neck. He must have felt there the first sensations of pleasure through the contact of his genital. The touching of the climbing pole woke the primary pleasure. This scene stands before his eyes! He let himself be carried by a schoolmate because he could then play with the fantasy that he was being borne by the father. His specific fantasy has therefore a bisexual character. Really a threefold one, for child, woman, and man appear in it. His original fantasy was: I will be a boy and be carried by a man. He then transferred the love from the mother to the father. He altered the primary fantasy and let the man carry a woman. Indeed, he wanted to be the woman! Such a reversal in the relation to the parents occurs very frequently and signifies the beginning of the defense against homosexuality. Only later is the boy displaced by the woman. But the fantasy actually reads : I will carry a man ; I will be a woman and submit to a man. From this attitude through reversal a masochistic attitude toward woman comes about. He will subject himself to a woman. But this fantasy contains also the wish to yield to the woman within himself and be homosexual. He car- ries the woman around with himself and would like to perform all sorts of friendly offices to the woman in himself. Thus an understanding of his anxiety as to place grows in us. He is afraid of himself and of his homosexual attitude. He might succumb to the dangers of the streets. He might be ac- costed. He might then become weak and be seduced to a homo- 22 SADISM AND MASOCHISM sexual act. The fear is the guardian of his virtue and his honor. And what does he then do when the desire becomes so strong that he is in danger of yielding ? He goes to bed and has his loved one, the doctor, summoned. The presence of the physician calms him because the physician has to examine him each time "from head to foot"; because the physician strokes him and massages his heart. The attacks serve to extort from him these small homosexual proofs of love and to satisfy in small coin the un- conscious craving. His physician is now his love. His presence quiets the storm in his breast; the anxiety with which the desire is mixed disap- pears, and he is calm until the longing precipitates a fresh attack. So far has the psychological illumination of the case succeeded. Now a feeling of guilt reveals itself in the patient, which forces him into the illness. He is the prisoner of his disorder, has re- nounced woman. But he had also become an ascetic in smoking and drinking. He had begun to go to church now and then and had spells of religion, which so far had been totally foreign to him. Gradually, in rather long conversations, there came to light an offense which had oppressed him greatly in latter years. I have already spoken of his wrong to his father. He had also been guilty of much toward his brother; his brother was a ne'er-do- well; he had to go to America and from there asked for money. The patient did not send it, and they had been already three years without news. That rested very heavily upon him and there were moments in which he reproached himself for this heartlessness, the more so because this brother was his mother's darling and his mother in her fine feeling avoided speaking of him. But he also had a sister who suffered from epileptic attacks, which he did not want to acknowledge. He considered her illness as simula- tion, because she always had an attack when she had a task to perform which she did not like.* He had a remarkable relation- ship with this sister, in which were mingled aversion, jealousy of the mother's favor, and sexual desire. It happened that this sister one evening suffered an attack in the neighborhood of a small pond and was so unfortunate as to fall with her face in the water, so that she was drowned.^ He was summoned by the country people to the place of the accident and arrived with a brother. They found the sister dead. It was already late in the evening, and he sent his brother into the city to fetch a carriage, while he remained with the sister. A WOMAN IS BEING CARRIED 23 Horrible thoughts now came to him, against which he had to defend himself with all his might. He lifted the sister up and carried her alone from the water all the way to the street. He carried her just as he carries the women in his fantasy. He was angry with himself that he had violent erections, and the thought tried to take possession of him that he should misuse the dead. This had happened ten years before the treatment. He believes that he had already had his masochistic fantasies before, but cannot definitely remember. In giving such evidence one is sub- ject to great deception in memory, for patients gladly conceal the origin of their fantasies and want to repress the incident which set them in motion. We see that his paraphilia represents an obsession, in which the libido unmasks itself as punishment for a definite occurrence. His fantasy means: Do not forget what you wanted to do and how near you were to being a great criminal ! You do not deserve the delight of possessing an ardent woman and should not attain to such a goal until the memory of the dead sister, whom it may be you drove to her death, has been wiped from your brain. Woman was taboo to him through association with the mother and the dead sister. Man was, too, because he had set himself on the de- fensive with all the fibers of his ego against the homosexual -cur- rents. The paraphilia was the way out of the confusion. It se- cured him his chastity and reminded him continually of the most evil hour of his life. He became a child and behaved as a child. A surprising determinant of his "carrying fantasy" came to light in the analysis in the form of a pregnancy fantasy. He identified himself with his mother and bore his sister in his body. A cleverly utilized aerophagy gave support to this fantasy and afiforded an organic basis for the heart attacks. Striking improvement soon followed upon the finished analysis. The patient was completely free from his anxiety, and the physi- cian lost his best patient. He soon became engaged to a charm- ing girl and is to-day the happy father of several children. The sadistic fantasy totally disappeared and gave place to normal feeling. This case is one of the most beautifully successful of any in my analytic practice and shows how unjustified is the skepticism with which we view therapeutic endeavors to cure paraphilias. This case reveals to us clearly how important for the under- standing of the paraphilias is the threefold division of the 24 SADISM AND MASOCHISM libido, man — woman — child. Without the knowledge of this trialism no analysis can make complete progress. But here we see an utter return to the infantile. Like a child he cannot remain alone away from home ; like a child he longs for some one he knows ; like a child he is happy when he goes toward home and unhappy when he leaves the house. His relation to his mother is really: I will be a child! He speaks of himself as his mother's best child. His attitude toward the father is that of master. Here the relationship has become reversed. The father has become his child, of whom he is the guardian and whom he completely tyrannizes. Adherence to what is old and to the family brought him innumerable conflicts. He could not free himself from the infantile relations. He was not through with his past. And again and again my statement is confirmed : That person is healthy who can overcome his past. But the case also reveals the significance of actual experience. The cardiac parapathy and the serious condition did not appear until after the occurrence with the sister, who suffered severe ''attacks." His "attacks" were the requital for his evil im- pulses, against which he had to defend himself with all his might. Analysis of the various causes has shown us how difficult it is to establish a uniform psychogenesis for masochism. We have been able again and again to find the origin of the maso- chism in sadism and have had no occasion to assume a "pri- mary masochism." It will not do, moreover, to construct dif- ferent sorts of masochism as Freud has done in his recent work: "The Economic Problem in Masochism" {Collected Papers, Volume II). He distinguishes between an erogenous, feminine, and moral masochism; the first corresponds to de- light in pain, the second to the feminine component, the cas- tration complex, the third is the expression of the uncon- scious feeling of guilt. This division does violence to the facts. In the first place, every masochism is erogenous. Where the will to subjection is not sexually toned, there we no longer have the right to speak of masochism. In the second place, the unconscious sense of guilt is precisely the cause that makes of the sadist a masochist. There is no masochism which does not include all three components within it. The castration A WOMAN IS BEING CARRIED 25 complex is present as expression of the feeling of guilt; it cor- responds to the flight from the original sadism, but is in itself not a main support of the entire system ; it may even be under some circumstances only of secondary importance. Sadism according to Freud would be the expression of the life instinct, masochism of the death instinct. As is well known it was I — and not Freud, as is mistakenly asserted — who as- sumed a primary death instinct.^ Nevertheless, I would hesi- tate to identify masochism directly with the death instinct. Freud says : *'In the multicellular living organism the libido meets the death or destruction instinct which holds sway there, and which tries to distintegrate this cellular being and bring each elemen- tal primary organism into a condition of inorganic stability (though this again may be but relative). To the libido falls the task of making this destructive instinct harmless, and it manages to dispose of it by directing it to a great extent and early in life — with the help of a special organic system, the musculature — toward the objects of the outer world. It is then called the instinct of destruction, of mastery, the will to power. A section of this instinct is placed directly in the service of the sexual function, where it has an important part to play : this is true sadism. Another part is not included in this dis- placement outwards; it remains within the organism and is 'bound' there libidinally with the help of the accompanying sexual excitation mentioned above : this we must recognize as the original erotogenic masochism. **We are entirely without any understanding of the physio- logical ways and means by which this subjugation of the death- instinct by the libido can be achieved. ... If one is willing to disregard a certain amount of inexactitude, it might be said that the death-instinct active in the organism — the primal sadism — is identical with masochism. ... So that this maso- chism would be a witness and a survival of that phase of de- velopment in which the amalgamation, so important for life afterwards, of death-instinct and Eros took place." I will not try to follow Freud upon the obscure field of meta- physics, in which he is and remains undisputed master. These discussions have no value for practical analysis. The mos^ 26 SADISM AND MASOCHISM learned treatises upon the death and life instincts will never cure the sadomasochist. Moreover, as I see it, the erogenous, feminine, and moral masochism are merged into one single masochism, which the last case reveals with especial clearness. Here we see the bondage to the father, later the overcompensat- ing (Edipus complex, finally the bondage to the mother. The sense of guilt makes this individual a masochist; the feminine attitude is accentuated; fear of death in consequence of talion dominates the entire clinical picture. The therapeutic result shows that we were able to lift the patient's feeling of anxiety and free him from his sense of guilt. But one more fact must be emphasized : The forced subjection to woman arose from the homosexual attitude toward the father, which had been thrust hack. XII A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATHY WITH SA- DISTIC AND PARANOID OBSESSIONS (SUSPI- CION OF A BEGINNING SCHIZOPHRENIA) By Drd. MED. Emil Gutheil Those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their own peril. Oscar Wilde. INTRODUCTION Case Number 26. Mr. Alpha, an engineer thirty-two years old, whose interesting analysis I am about to describe, came to Dr. Stekel begging for help. He finds himself in a desperate situation. Having a position in a large chemical laboratory, he is unable to fulfill the duties of his post because fantasies and all sorts of obsessive conditions prevent concentration of his mind upon his work. Besides, he is tortured at times by nervous gastric troubles, compulsion to sleep, and depressions, which make it impossible for him to finish work upon his dissertation, as well as to study in general. He is on the point of suicide unless some one helps him out of the chaos. He has already consulted several physicians, among them the physician of a sick-benefit society, a specialist, and finally a well-known psychiatrist, Professor P. He has been treated through medi- cine, diet, and hydrotherapy. All without result. His situa- tion seems to him particularly dangerous for the reason that in manipulation with reagents in the laboratory, the impulse often rises in him to escape from life through poison. Dr. Stekel, to whom he turned for help, gave the case over to Dr. van Dishoeck, a Holland pupil then with him, but the latter, leaving Austria about that time, was unable to do more than begin the analysis. The case was referred to me after van Dishoeck. The analysis, which I carried out under the 27 28 SADISM AND MASOCHISM direction of my teacher Dr. Stekel, after 102 sessions, with many interruptions, of which we will speak later, reached a successful conclusion. THE FIRST COMMUNICATIONS An important factor came to light in the very first sessions. The patient told me that all the symptoms which he had reported thus far were of secondary importance to one single one which was bringing him of late to sheer despair ; this was the absolutely irresistible impulse to murder his wife. He entreated me to save him, for he frequently had to use all his energy to suppress the desire to choke his wife — especially during the sex act. At every difference of opinion with her, he feels the impulse to fling him- self upon her. At best he is able to reduce the compulsion to a few slaps, which he gives his wife, when the agitation passes over. He feels contrite and remorseful after such states of excitement and occupies himself with thoughts of suicide, but usually falls into a peculiarly deep slumber, which often lasts the greater part of a day. I learn that he not long ago married a girl with whom he had carried on sexual relations for some time, and who had become pregnant by him. The outbreaks of rage of the sort described did not appear until after marriage. His wife had borne a girl a few days before. He had no paternal feeling; on the contrary, the murder impulses now extend even to the infant. Is the wife attractive? — No, she is actually ugly. Her mouth reaches from ear to ear, her nose is broad, her neck is disfigured by a goiter. She is a woman of the common people, while he is an academic person, son of a former officer, and on his mother's side even from the nobility. She brought no money to the mar- riage and lives from the salary she gets from a subordinate posi- tion, which merely supplies her personal needs. Why did he marry? — In order to have a regular object for sexual intercourse. He is tired of the continual seeking for a sexual object. The women make it difficult to break off ac- quaintanceship; they sell themselves as if they were jewels. The man always has to be the exploited one. The first paranoid idea comes gradually to light: The women should be put to death. They have unlimited power over the men. He expands over this subject: The women have power over his metal tranquillity, for it is they on whose account he has constantly to be sexually ex- A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATHY 29 cited. He has to be always thinking of them and chasing after them. They know that nothing can take their place, and they present an unbroken front against the pitiable male sex. Suffering themselves to be merely supported by man leads them always to apply themselves to making the least effort possible in the struggle for existence. Man has to wear himself out, and it rests with woman simply to deny him the only joy in life, sexual gratification. He finally produces fantasies (particularly in the latter period) in which he himself is a woman and so follows the path of least resistance. He permits himself to be managed by men, sells the sex act for its weight in gold (prostitute fantasies), he "exploits" the men, and so on. He knows that such thoughts are absurd (no flaws in the reasoning!) and he will have to remain a *'man" for all time. Nevertheless, this makes him furious. He would like to drive the women together into great heaps and in the turn of a hand reduce them with machine guns to bloody masses of dead bodies. ... When I express surprise that the question of the relation of the two sexes is of such vital interest to him who admittedly had already found his sexual object, I learn the following remarkable fact : His marriage is no ordinary one. He made a written contract with his wife that i. he would pay nothing toward the household expenses, but would be responsible solely for the lodgings and the maintenance of the child ; 2. he is free at any time to break faith and 3. to get a divorce whenever it suits him. He as well as his wife left the Catholic Church before this ''marriage," in order that they would be able more easily to secure an eventual divorce.^ Alpha has made free use of his permission to exercise sexual liberty, yet he has not succeeded in entering into a permanent relationship, for here again his parapathic symptoms (obsessive sleep, outbursts of fury, and so on) have stood in the way. On the other hand he is dominated by the idea, despite his slight share in the household management, that his wife asks too much money ; she has undertaken to compensate for her unfavorable position in the contract through small pilferings of money; and more of the same sort, which afforded him occasion for the obsessive actions mentioned. THE ACTUAL CONFLICT It is evident that Alpha entered into marriage with his girl, who was neither pretty nor rich nor of good family, in a typically 30 SADISM AND MASOCHISM parapathic manner. The marriage was for him an attempt to he rescued from the bonds of the parapathy (tendency toward health!) carried out through unsuitable, because at the same time parapathic, means. Alpha himself sees that throughout the entire period he has not been actually clear whether he is married or not. The relation to his wife suggests this in two ways. Her pregnancy, as was soon revealed, was decisive for his resolution to marry the girl. Why had he made her pregnant? — Through carelessness. He "just positively" had no preventive with him, so he had inter- course "without" it. The consequences soon followed. He was not surprised and accepted the whole thing as more or less a matter of course. Only that he altered his original purpose to consider his relation to the girl as temporary and concluded the marriage agreement of which we know. . . . The specific pathological situation from which he was rescuing himself in this marriage was not at first known to me, although in the early hours of treatment the knowledge dawned upon me that the marriage in this form was untenable. But I said nothing as yet to the patient about it. We will now turn our interest to the patient's environment. HIS FATHER He was an active officer, but had to give up his profession be- cause he had married a girl who, although of noble birth, was nevertheless poor and could not bring the dowry prescribed by the public treasury. He became first a private tutor, then after his wife's death a man of independent means, and finally after suc- cessful speculations a stock jobber. The marriage was an un- happy and stormy one. He became nervous, gave way to out- breaks of fury, in his anger often smashed up the furniture, and the like. The boy was psychically influenced in the most un- favorable manner through the conditions at home. Alpha has retained an unpleasant memory of a scene in his earliest child- hood : he sees his father quarreling with his mother in the greatest excitement and then go to the wall and strike against the wall with his head. Alpha even at that time considered this an un- worthy manifestation of the father's weakness toward the mother. THE MOTHER She was two years older than the father. She was the unlimited mistress of the home, for she possessed more experience with life A CASE OF COMPLICATED PAR APATHY 31 and more practical sense than her husband. She bore her son (our patient) in the second month of marriage, a token that she had been made pregnant before marriage. I mention this for it appears that the patient, who discovered this (sixteen to seventeen years old) in the marriage certificate, considered this the imme- diate cause for which his father had married his mother. At any rate, this circumstance gave him cause for thought, and yet he shrank from putting a direct question to his father in regard to it (source of doubt). The mother died at the age of fifty-three, in the patient's twenty-fifth year, in a paralogic state following "grippe of the head.*' BROTHERS AND SISTERS The patient had two sisters, Erna and Helene.* The first was born when the patient was between four and five years old and died at fifteen of tuberculosis. The latter came into the world when our patient was between fifteen and sixteen and now lives with the widowed father in a beautiful home in a choice part of the city. anamnesis: the first experiences His memories go back to the second and third years of his life. He was interested in heaven and the angels, of whom his mother told him they were children who had died. Alpha ex- pressed the wish likewise to be an angel and begged his mother to chop oflf his hand so that he could go to heaven. This strange bit of information found its explanation in the course of the analysis ; however, it has no more than the value of an hypothesis, inasmuch as the more detailed circumstances from this earliest period of childhood are no longer recollected by the patient. He can per- haps recall that in the first years he was frequently reminded by his father not to hold his hand at his genital ; also the cutting oflE of his hand was sometimes suggested to him as a possibility. It happened, furthermore, that about this time a neighbor's child was run over by a freight wagon with the result that both legs had to be amputated. The child died after the operation. — It is therefore possible that these experiences taken together were determinants for the child's strange idea and the playing with the genital fell into association with losing the hand and dying. The assumption that the boy even at that time was willing to give up the pleasure for the happiness of heaven has much to be said for it * Names changed. 32 SADISM AND MASOCHISM and would be of importance for this reason, because it would mean that for the childish mind the idea of sexual pleasure (playing with the genital) and of dying had already formed a fixed rela- tionship. As a further result we should have here the fact already familiar to us that the patient with a compulsive parapathic type of reaction considers the sexual impulse in itself as a burden- some constraint (Stekel: Fetishism). For if the said connection between sexual pleasure and dying was actually present in the patient's earliest years, we then understand his profound anti- sexual attitude, upon which later analysis came and which was disclosed as an opposite pole behind his external craving for love. Another experience (four to five) may be noted here. A nurse was playing with the boy by a window and played the game of holding him outside the window, which caused great fear in the child. He can never forget the strange feeling of floating over the depth below. It is interesting that shortly after this, as it were to rid himself of this primary fear, he would often hold his rocking-horse out of the window and once even flung it down below with evident satisfaction. Here lie the first traces of the parapathic sadism. Parapathic — because here already may be seen a clear psychic transformation of the primary traumatic ma- terial. For the space of one moment the boy in danger of his life was dependent upon the kindness or the ruthlessness of the person caring for him. Yet this moment was sufficient to make conscious to him for the first time in his life his own inadequacy, his de- pendence upon the grown people in his environment. Toward the rocking-horse he was the stronger, lord of its '*life and death." . . . We see in the child's strange play with the horse a parapathic reversal of the passive emotion of pain into an active pleasure (Freud), a powerful correction of the relationship, I and the en- vironment, in regard to the feeling of power. At the same period the boy attempts to bite the girls with whom he plays, for which he has to be frequently punished by those who take care of him. Conditions in the home environment contributed first of all to the transformation of the child's normal (primary) sadism into a parapathic sadism. THE FIRST IMPULSIVE ACTIONS AND ATTEMPTS AT REPRESSION The irritable and nervous father was roused to all sorts of in- justice toward the mother and the children and became early an A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATHY 33 object of thorough hatred to our patient. When his sister Erna arrived, he turned his hatred against her. He would have no rival in the house. This was the reason why he could not look at her for weeks after her birth and only after long coaxing by his parents decided to make the acquaintance of the infant. His entire love, which until that time had been concentrated upon his mother's person, was shaken by the birth of the sister. He began to doubt the mother's love, although after this event as before he was really the acknowledged favorite of the mother. None the less did the boy court the favor of his parents unceasingly through the years that followed and he sought to win their interest upon a way already parapathic. He often would say he was tired, when they made excursions or on other occasions, and let his father carry him on his arm. He wished for himself a "severe illness" so that he might positively know whether he was still the object of his parents' solicitude. ... There should be mentioned further from the sixth to the ninth year the anal erotism and exhibitionism and, further, in the eighth and ninth years a peculiar desire to be chastised by the father (m.asochism), which had its beginning in the father's demand that the boy should present himself voluntarily for punishment for a misdemeanor, a demand which was made upon the boys also at this time by a teacher. We notice during the same years a strong increase of religious feeling in the boy. He goes to church every Sunday, prays constantly, and so on. The influence of a priest was decisive here, a certain Father K., who had a marked suggestive effect upon the children. The patient recalls from the period of instruction discussion of original sin and of the Fourth * Com- mandment, which stamped itself rather strongly upon him. It seems thus as if the boy was seeking at this time to achieve a process of fundamental psychic healing, as if the unruliness and want of control of the earliest years of childhood tried to find per- fect peace. But it was evident that the manifestations of these years represented parapathic attempts, furthered by the religious influences, to oppose to the pressure of the antimoral impulses correspondingly strong barriers. We find in this period (nine to ten) extensive power fantasies (which found so much greater expression the more clearly he saw that he was physically the weakest among his playmates), but at the same time also many flagellation fantasies. Every possible infantile tendency appears here and betrays his powerful instinctive life: sadomasochism, * Fifth in the English Bible (Translator). 34 SADISM AND MASOCHISM peeping, exhibitionism (the penis sHps out of the opening of his trousers and he "has not the courage" to attend to it, because his sister is looking at him . . .), kleptomania (stealing candles from the churchyard), and pyromania. We see that the oscillatory amplitude between the manifestations of his instinctive and moral egos is a significant one, which gives us a clue to the nature of his parapathy. HOMOSEXUAL TRAUMATA AND ATTEMPTS AT REPRESSION ONANISM In the eleventh to the twelfth year the patient was seduced to homosexual play by the pupils of the boarding school which his father conducted at that time, and was abused in a passive form (paedicatio). He gave particular attention to this kind of sexual activity and produced from this time on (twelve to thirteen) fantasies of denying himself "the girls," who resisted him when he tried to approach them sexually, and yielding to passive homo- sexuality. Yet his attitude to girls is still so far "normal," that he can have relationship with them without the obsessive states which are later associated with them. The homosexuality remains until most recent times in the latent condition. The patient's disclosures of his attitude toward woman in these years are interesting and I will let them follow : "I was not afraid of woman in any regard up to the time in which I learned of her sexual role. I thought: That is not a boy, that is a girl, of whom you need have no fear. But from the moment that I discovered the sexual relations between woman and man, woman became for me an enemy, something mysterious, significant, before which one must be on one's guard. . . ." In the patient's twelfth or thirteenth year, his sister was ill with lung disease. About this time his religiousness came to the fore a second time. He wanted, for instance, to be a monk. He begins onanism in the thirteenth or fourteenth year under the instigation of the boarding-school pupils. The fantasies, which at first were concerned with the normal sexual act, gradually take on a pathological character. Thus we see in this sexual period the fantasy of urination in the mouth as a preliminary to onanism, the fantasy of looking from underneath at a woman defecating (mother), as it were from the closet bowl (identification with the closet), and other such things. The patient already at this time feels his sexual impulse as a burdensome compulsion, as also A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATHY 35 the need for urination and defecation, and is always endeavoring somehow or other to exclude and suppress these necessary in- terests. To be obliged in the end to submit to the impulsion to these physiological functions means for him then an indescribable feeling of pleasure. An onanistic fantasy from the patient's boyhood illustrates this : I. Since I usually performed onanism in the closet (in accord- ance with my fantasy at that time), a higher civil or religious authority had placed the stay in the closet under control, and one had to obtain a ticket which gave the time (five minutes) at a sort of ticket office from a man in uniform, by saying, **A ticket for a stool." If one was not through in five minutes, one was drummed out and had to stop before the appearance of the orgasm. One might, however, get a second ticket ''for hard stools," which allowed ten minutes, in which one could avoid the restriction. If one still was not through, one was treated as above. Both the idea of the forced giving up of the end pleasure and the circum- vention of the limitation prescribed are toned with pleasure. In his fourteenth year the patient spied upon his parents' coitus. He practiced onanism at the same time, as he says, "vying with the father." He then follows the development of the mother's pregnancy. He gets some intimation that the parents' attempt to effect an artificial abortion has failed. The patient finds himself in a permanent state of excitement. The onanism has a pro- nounced masochistic character and is accompanied by urolag- nistic and flagellatory fantasies — a condition which would seldom be observed in this intensity with a parapathic. (Nothing of a paralogy can yet be determined ; only symptoms from a later period lead one to suspect schizophrenia!) School achievement at this time reveals nothing striking. The self-consciousness of the patient is seriously impaired by a disfiguring skin disorder (acne); comrades deride him calling him the "pimple king"; girls avoid his company. . . . BUILDING UP OF THE PARAPATHY BIRTH OF THE SECOND SIS- TER DEATH OF THE SISTER ERNA The patient consciously, in his fifteenth to sixteenth year, turned the incest fantasies, concerning the mother and sister, to onanism. In the same period occurs a conflict of serious import to a boy, the doubt whether he is the son of his father (family romance), a doubt upon which Stekel lays great weight in the investigation 36 SADISM AND MASOCHISM of parapathies in which obsessive states predominate (of. also pages 30, 31 ). Two sexual traumata occur in the same period : the father surprises him at onanism and prophesies an early invalidism, and not long after this there is an experience with the sister Erna, who grabs him at his genital. He defends himself against his sister's desire, later to reproach himself for a long time that he had neglected a favorable opportunity to come into sexual contact with her. The birth of his sister Helene, which took place about this time, was a further great event for the boy. The hatred which he had already revealed against the former rival was turned now to the second one. Sadistic ideas relating to the child alternated with masochistic acts, which he performed on his own body. The fol- lowing urolagnistic performance among others was carried out by the boy. He balanced himself by his hand over the bowl in the closet, his bladder overfull, let the urine flow, while the pleasure gradually increased, and tried to catch it in his open mouth. A desperate struggle was carried on against onanism ; attempt at coitus (seventeenth year) failed because of total impotence (fear of sexual disease). The morality curve rises so far from this time that one might speak of a marked piety on the part of the patient. When the patient is nineteen years old, Erna dies at the age of fifteen. The boy, who believes in the omnipotence of thought, considers himself the murderer of his sister. He recalls having thoughts of putting her out of the way even a few hours before her death. He now fantasies concerning the making of a chemical discovery for the destruction of the tuberculosis bacillus, which, as he has heard, produces this disease, and so to rid the world of it. He manifests in general a great interest in chemistry and sets up at home a small laboratory, in which he spends his leisure time. Some later attempts at coitus with prostitutes and servant girls succeed. He reaches his twentieth year during the mental processes described. A gonorrhea should be mentioned from this period, acquired with a prostitute and disappearing after six weeks of treatment. Then he passes through the war in military service feeling fairly well. THE LATTER YEARS — DEATH OF THE MOTHER In his twenty-second year he comes into the hinterland. The field service was painful; he was always trying to "crowd himself A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATHY 37 down/' At home he breathed freely. Yet he was nervous here and unsettled and visited several physicians, who quieted him. Sadism stands in the foreground of his fantasy at this time, di- rected against the entire female sex. He loses his mother when he is in his twenty-seventh year. He is calm and composed ; one day after her death he indulges in onanism with the fantasy of strangling a woman during coitus. The parapathy becomes more serious, while a great number of obsessive states appear. Alpha offers himself voluntarily to a socialistic defense formation, ostensibly to find some goal in his psychic chaos ; begins, as he puts it, "to act the Bolshevik and the demagogue" and feels in this role extremely well. He fantasies riots, a bloody putting down of the reaction ; then follows a period of reflection, when he begins to study. He imagines, however, that he can study only when he is "in order with his sexuality.*' And that is impossible in the face of his parapathic condition. At this time he becomes acquainted with his present wife, with whom he finds a certain stability ; he soon resolves to marry her (twenty-nine years of age) and takes up his residence with her. He breaks off at the same time his relations with his father. He cannot, as he says, get on with the latter. The ground of their dissension, as I learned later, was that the father could not or would not yield to the son's constant demands for money. THE ANALYSIS It brought to light without much difficulty the CEdipus complex. The patient confessed to frank incest fantasies with and without onanistic activity. They concerned the mother as well as the sis- ter. (Women who were mothers were characteristically not dragged into the sadistic fantasies, in which he allowed women to be destroyed in multitudes!) The words of the mother, for ex- ample (the patient at the age of fifteen or sixteen), in regard to the nursing of his sister Helene had a pronounced pleasurable effect upon him : ''From this bosom you both have drunk" (the patient and Erna). Alpha used the idea of sucking at the mother's breast as onanistic fantasy (relation to fellatio fantasy). The analysis also discloses a mechanism which rests upon the identifica- tion of the patient with his father in relation to choice of partner and helps us to understand why the patient always feared that he would be exploited, subjugated, deprived of his own will by woman. When Alpha learned of his too early birth, he formed a (quite likely!) theory that the mother had forced his father to 38 SADISM AND MASOCHISM marry against his will because she had already allowed herself to be impregnated by him. At least this was the way he tried to explain the unhappy life together of his parents. The woman forces the man to marry; this was the terrifying specter which had its par- alyzing effect upon him in all his sexual undertakings, after he had had a glimpse of his parents' marriage certificate. He tried to make his sexual ideal different from that of the mother. If the mother was eager to rule, he sought for himself a "little vassal," as he expressed it, a modest creature who would be pleased with everything he did; was the mother proud of her origin and thoroughly undemocratic in feeling, then he was drawn *'under- neath" to the level of the people, where he felt himself at home. He sought the negative of his mother and revealed thereby lack of freedom in his love choice, an erotic dependence upon his pri- mary sexual object. He found himself in the same tragic situa- tion in which all those find themselves who are compelled to change their original love attitude in the border of the CEdipus complex into an attitude of hatred as a consequence of a disap- pointment on the part of the primary object (mother). It is due probably to accessory factors which constellation of the libido then appears in any one case ; but if there is — as here — an amalgamation of a primary love with a secondary hate, then we have the dispo- sition for a sadistic parapathy. Alpha speaks bitterly, for example, of the pain, the shame, and the hatred which he felt on being required once by the mother (eighth or ninth year) for some misdemeanor to allow himself voluntarily to be punished by her in the presence of a stranger woman. The pathogenic character of this punishment is not far to seek : it was the beloved mother from whom he had to receive willingly the chastisement ! The disturbed love attitude toward his mother resulted also for the patient in a change in position toward women in general. He was afraid of women ; this fear receded the sooner, note well, the more ugly the women were. Inasmuch as he estimated them all according to the mother's qualities, he believed among other things that woman grants a favor to man in the sexual act and is ex- clusively the yielding partner. He had to suffer doubtless under the ugliness complex (acne), yet the analysis showed that he had nothing but unhappiness with women.^ He left most of them alone, or he so conducted himself that he took from them also every pleasure in intercourse with him. Thus often when he had to wait longer than ten minutes for his friend at a rendez- A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATHY 39 vous he would fall into such a rage that he would be forced to slap the girl even upon the busiest streets. Again and again he saved himself from this compulsion, under which he suffered himself, by- hastening home and falling into a deep sleep. This behavior falls into the chapter of impulsive actions, to be more profoundly con- sidered later. I might simply remark here that it had no influence whatever upon his relation to feminine objects in many cases, that the ill-treated women in question again and again kept up the relation with him, and that in spite of all these proofs of their devotion, Alpha always had some new argument ready as to the falseness of women and their endeavor to secure power over the man. The identification with the father worked here — as has been said — to form complexes. In absolute identification with the father he, too, got a girl with child and permitted her then to "force him to marry." At least he was always reproaching his wife in his parapathic condition that she had compelled him to marry, although in the analysis he ra- tionalized the conclusion of his marriage as due to the ''difficulty in making a love choice." Any one who is familiar with the significance of this external compulsion for the parapathic (Stekel: Fetishism) will be able to value this factor also in the patient's behavior. Alpha's attitude toward the problem of being forced was a bipolar one. He ar- ranged for himself on the one hand a forced situation, for, through the half-intended begetting of the child, he made it necessary to enter into a marriage likely from the beginning to fail ; on the other hand he remonstrated against this external compul- sion by the (internal) obsession of his murderous impulse. The inner compulsion must release him from the outer one : a typical parapathic reaction. He called his daughter significantly Helene, as the father had named his. We must not forget that from the moment of the sister's procreation, upon which he spied, he lived through her birth. He performed onanism while his father was engaged in coitus, as he said, "vying with the father." He there- fore participated in imagination in the conception of this sister. And now he has his own Helene. The parallel which I have drawn here is not unimportant. It explains to us a part of the "as-if" system of the patient, which he set up over every problem of his life. He says himself regard- ing this system, toward the end of the analysis in a moment of fuller self-recognition : "It seems to me as if in my entire action I followed a secret SADISM AND MASOCHISM principle of yes and no. Whatever I undertake is at the same time good and bad, at the same time moral and immoral, binding and releasing, positive and negative. ... In the end, I doubt the value of whsii has been done and find myself practically at the starting point, striving anew to find a way that will be good, moral, freeing, positive. . . His marriage, concluded not from any deeper desire, was such an "as-if" product. Alpha was married — the famous contract as- sured him, besides, complete sexual freedom. He had a sexual object — the latter was also of such a sort that it could not con- centrate the patient's full libido upon itself. At all events, the bond sufficed to lend to the fiction of having been forced a "shred of reality" (Stekel). As we became clear concerning the deeper connections of the actual conflict, we brought to Alpha's attention the pathological aspect of his marriage, but especially the arrangement of the com- pulsive situation which inclined him to impulsive action. Alpha saw that formal divorce as an end to his marriage was abso- lutely necessary for the putting aside of the severe actual con- flict. Inasmuch as the formalities of a divorce had been already prepared by him in detail, it did not take long to separate the two unhappy persons, upon which the psychic condition of the patient was obviously much improved. He set up a bachelor home, and it seemed as if we were over the worst. The remarkable thing then was that Alpha, after some unsuc- cessful attempts to make new acquaintances, went back to his divorced wife, entered with her into a sexual relation, in which he remained free from most of his former obsessive acts. They lived together now in harmony ; Alpha worked upon his theme for dissertation and devoted himself to the education of the child. It was plain to me that the removal of the compulsion toward the marriage had in this case carried with it the necessary psychic disburdening, but at the same time I knew that the change which had been brought about was only of a superficial nature and the real pathologic agencies remained untouched. What sort of instinctive forces were these? Analysis revealed here a complicated parapathic construction. The mother fixation has already been discussed. The CEdipus situation was given up at an early period, when the primary love object (mother) became an object of hatred and fear. This atti- tude is beautifully maintained in the following dream: : I. I see myself in a hilly country. Everything is bathed in A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATHY 41 sunshine. I am to climb a height, as if I wanted to build a house there. A woman is standing upon the elevation. Splendid, like a queen, Greek goddess, or an Amazon. I do not trust myself up there. The woman's shield glances in the sun, so that I have to turn away my eyes. . . . I believe that the patient's relation to woman cannot be more truly represented. His ascent to the shining heights of love, where he might establish himself ("build a house") is prevented by the idea of a well-defended, threatening woman ("queen, goddess, Amazon"). He does not trust himself upon the height. At the same time we find here in the picture the idea of woman (mother) in association with the idea of "being above," a relationship which, as we have seen, signified a fateful situation for our patient. He fears the domination of the woman. The primary hate object (father) becomes secondarily one worthy of being pitied, in the same way a suppressed creature, his love object {father fixation). To please the father, to win his approbation, his favor, becomes his most earnest wish, as one of his dreams also shows us : 2. I find myself with my father eating. A postman comes and brings my (good) testimonial. I am praised and feel very proud. Father boasts of me before the students. . . . The constellation we have mentioned as within the CEdipus com- plex forms the basis of the patient's latent homosexuality. The homosexual experiences from his boyhood (cf. page 34) pre- vented on their part a total repression of the homosexual com- ponent, so that a large portion of the stream of libido remains withdrawn from the feminine object. A dream : 3. Find myself in a room with a colleague T. and an older man with side whiskers a la Francis Joseph, who is however quite uneducated (a man of the people). Both T. and I are undressed. T. sits on my legs facing me, holding my phallus between his legs. He has no phallus, so that mine may be in place of his. It is not in erection at first, but then gradually. T. struggles against fel- latio. Then he does it. I watch him bite into my organ with great pleasure. . . . Association to an "older man," God the Father, who sees th^ act. The interpretation of the dream may be spared. The words : Friend T. "has no phallus, so that mine may be in place of his," SADISM AND MASOCHISM as well as the ''biting into" show relation to the active and passive castration complex, concerning which we will speak later. The onanism fantasy from the patient's fifteenth year is also homosexual. II. Women dance dervish dances until they are completely ex- hausted. Fantasy myself into the woman's place. . . . We have learned to know in our analysis beside the anti- feministic tendencies a still further important obstacle upon the patient's way to his feminine object: the sadomasochism. We assume that this complex has its foundation in the power- ful (congenital) instinctive nature of the patient and has been developed through the transformation of the incest love into hate, as well as through the incidental experiences. It perhaps is effec- tive as the strongest hindrance in the way of the activity of the heterosexual instinctive component. An onanistic fantasy from the twenty-fourth year will serve as an example : III. Am a billionaire, have my own house with the cellar ar- ranged for sadistic orgies. I abduct a lady in an automobile, bring her to me, and compel her to go into the cellar rooms. The woman is seized there, strapped to a chair, and whipped. She is angry at being thus taken unawares, but her cries of pain are of no avail. Orgasm. This fantasy II is elaborated in a sadistic-masochistic sense. IV. Women are dancing dervish dances and are then flogged by an older woman after they have become exhausted. Fantasy myself into the scene dressed as a woman (three ejaculations within one day). This fantasy shows the masochistic element ; we see, if we com- pare it with the one before the last, the bipolarity in our patient's reaction toward the power complex. A portion of his own fem- inine personality is also to be sought somehow in the women beaten by him. We learn the following regarding the connections within the sadomasochistic complex : The patient's instinctive life in the first years of childhood is extraordinarily strong. He is, as he expresses it himself, ''sole ruler" in the home, and every wish is gratified. The experience with the servant in which he feared for his life was the first trauma, the birth of the sister Erna (as the absolute end of his autocracy) the second trauma, in the field of his consciousness of power. His parapathy was constructed during these years from A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATHY 43 the almost undiscoverable original sadistic material. The ap- parently discoverable masochistic component (it may be plainly visible, because it is in general socially proper) develops mani- festly as the product of the repression of parapathic sadism. The masochistic complex includes also a series of infantilisms like mysophilia, urolagnia, spermo- and coprophagy, and such like. Thus, for example, the smell of the vaginal mucus afifects him, since he detected it for the first time in his mother's underclothing (twelve to thirteen), as an erotic stimulus and he has artificially produced it later by chemical methods (trimethylamine) for the purpose of masturbation.^ We find in the patient a striking preference for strong per- fumes even up to the present time, as an overcompensation for this mysophiliac complex. All the manifestations described have to do with the field of psychosexual infantilism. We attribute the persistence of the infantilism to the fact that the patient, who spent his childish years in love and unrestricted pleasure. (The hatred toward the father at that time lay within the borders of the normal CEdipus attitude and only later, like the boy's love to his mother, assumed a pathological character.) In the later years the patient, de- ceived in real pleasure values, reached back to the early infantile. The mechanisms described by Freud in "A Child Is Being Beaten" play the most important part in the vacillation we have described between sadism and extreme masochism. The primary wish of the boy that one might beat (kill) one's sisters was at first compensated through religiousness; then there was an identifica- tion process which provided the masochistic reaction (see the anamnesis). Finally there was a breaking through of the original sadistic instinctive tendency (a) in the parapathic fantasy and (b) temporarily in the criminal impulsive actions. The patient reports that his sister Erna once brought home a bad school testimonial and he expected that she would get a whipping for it (as was usually the case with him). He felt a distinct pleasure at the idea. But the father did not punish the girl ; this was for our patient one more reason for believing in the favored position of the female sex and for clinging to his sadistic fantasies. Every thought of the beating of children be- came then pleasurable for him. The active and the passive castration complex are also associ- ated with the sadomasochistic complex. The former lies hidden in the deeper layers of the psyche, is 44 SADISM AND MASOCHISM unknown to consciousness, and could be found more clearly, be- sides in the dream given on page 41, only in the more profound one which followed. (The latter dream has still other meanings which will not be mentioned here.) It reads: 4. Duelling ground. Professor B. from the intermediate school has challenged me (association : Similar case in an Austrian university). It comes to a duel. B. has a sharp rapier. I have a dull one (association: Reason for duel, a woman?). I am con- fused. The fight begins. I have the advantage of B. Through a skillful stroke I succeed in knocking his sword from his hand. Strong aflfect of fear throughout the dream. ' The passive castration complex is found already in the region of consciousness in the various daydreams. It is a product of the sense of guilt and of talion, which is called forth through the active castration thoughts. It is at the service of the ascetic and the homosexual tendency and on the one side expresses renunciation of the sexual object, in a further sense, of sexuality in general ; on the other side the emasculation, that is, the femini- zation of the patient. This endeavor on the part of the patient should be already familiar to us from what has preceded ; yet the patient feels sex as a burdensome compulsion and the role of mascuHnity as a disagreeable, dangerous, and thankless business. ("The women take advantage of the men," and so on.) The ''feminization" also serves the latent homosexual tendencies. Think of the patient's idea of becoming a male prostitute ! This idea has often been so strong that he has attempted in total identification with the woman to put straws and thin splinters of wood into the urethra of the erected organ. On the other hand, -in consequence of a nervous spasm of the sphincter he could not urinate when a man was present in the urinal (defense against the homosexual fantasy of being overpowered). I discovered another significant detail while discussing the feminine component. Directly before his marriage the patient was invited by an artist to a homosexual entertainment. He had opportunity at that time to yield to his former prostitute fantasy. But he rejected the over- ture. Two days afterward he concluded with his later wife his "marriage contract." It seems fair to assume that the desire for security, for a surer bond with the other sex, was also a deciding factor in leading the patient to change the sexual relation with the girl into marriage. There is much to lead us to believe that he concluded his marriage in escape from his homosexuality. ' If we speak of the passive castration complex, we must also A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATHY 45 consider a fantasy which played a great role in the patient's period of puberty. This is an odd fantasy in which he is pursued because of a crime against morality, his own member severed. He states also that frequently in the years of his greatest piety he played with the idea of sacrificing his genital '*in order to lead a life pleasing to God." What sort of a crime against morality can the patient have meant? — For a long time he could give no nearer explanation. But gradually the important fact came to light that it had to do with the idea of the lust murder of a child. Dreams brought it to speech. 5. I was in the theater with my mother and sister Helene, who seemed in the dream to be about twelve years old, and I had gone home first. I find myself in a state of erotic excitement. I see our nursery, where the sister is already lying and I am about to go into my bed, which is still standing there. Yet I know that I am thirty years old and may no longer sleep in the nursery. I hear Father and Mother passing by the window. I have a riding whip in my hand and should like to whip the sister before the parents come in. Am afraid. Instead of the parents, a pair of common people enter. She begins to dispute about something (to eat?). The man tears her cloak, made of army cloth, in part to shreds. Throw myself between them and call the man to ac- count. Fear. Awake. Incest and infantilism (nursery!) are clear at the first glance at this dream. He wants to whip the sister. (He is thirty years old and she twelve!) The scene breaks off (moral censorship) and is brought to an end with the aid of two substitute persons. The ''tearing into shreds'' must be understood somewhat dras- tically, as the associations reveal. Direct threads lead from the pair of common people to his wife. Many a brutality toward the wife begins to grow clearer to us. — Still plainer is the next dream: 6. A student is playing with my sister Helene (or with my child?). Suddenly I see myself with my mother (wife, at any rate some authority) and tell her that some one has beaten Helene. I seem to myself particularly good and abhor the people who do such things. . . . Then I dream of flaying a little black girl, who willingly lets me do this. I see the girl (Helene, my wife, my daughter?) is being overturned from backward forward. Awake. . . . The dream is very instructive. It shows, beside the tendency 46 SADISM AND MASOCHISM to putting his own child out of the way, like the preceding dream the root also of his lust-murder complex, which is found in the attitude toward his sister. Let us turn back now to the castration complex. We have determined in the passive castration complex a latent wish of the patient to be a woman, and so we must at the same time consider that this desire was merely a pathological demonstration, an action of defiance toward that world order which ostensibly is prejudicial to men. For the analysis was able unqualifiedly to establish that the patient had striven, in the same degree in which he had yielded to the fantasy of being a woman, to suppress in his person every manifestation of feminine nature. We found that a large portion of the energy which he employed in conflict with the female sex (but especially against his wife) was devoted to the struggle with the feminine component in his own nature. He could not destroy the woman within himself ; he fantasied on the other hand con- tinually a mass murder of the entire female sex. . . . We must keep before us that our patient, like all individuals undergoing an extensive splitting of consciousness, possessed in his parapathic states a well-marked ability for identification and projection, that he therefore on one side experienced much in his own ego which pertained to external objects; on the other side, was able to displace a part of his personal affect upon external objects or upon the totality of things and express a conflict between the "moral ego" and the ''instinct ego" in the relationship, "ego- universality." His onanistic lust-murder fantasies (for example, strangling of the female object, with orgasm) and the lust-suicide fantasies (for example, hara-kiri fantasy with onanism) are also equivalent, according to this explanation. We find, too, frequent fantasies which contain mutual lust murder. Our patient struggles desperately against the outbreak of his criminal tendencies. His profound splitting of consciousness (he carries on conversations out loud with himself!) makes this fight an exceedingly difficult one. If the impulse to passion murder overtook him, he would usually seek refuge in sleep, of which he also asserted it was for him an equivalent of suicide. The patient says concerning this sleeping of his : If a woman leaves me "sitting up" at a rendezvous or on other occasions, when I want to suppress my impulse to do something in fury to her, then I hasten home and lie down to sleep. I would much rather commit suicide. It almost seems to me as if I were enacting suicide through sleep. I once had the impulse to take A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATH^ 47 my life (this idea is a very pleasurable one for me), and I wanted to take cyanide of potassium. Instead of this I took paraldehyde and saved myself through sleep. I feel in sleep as if I were hidden ; sleep seems to me like a welcome place of refuge which stands open for me in every unhappy situation and in troublesome thoughts. . . Twice the criminal impulse was so strong that he was no longer able to withstand it. The first time it happened like this. A girl of his acquaintance came to him to ask him to prepare some potassium cyanide for her brother, who was a photographer. As this girl had long suffered from depression, Alpha conceived the suspicion that really the girl intended suicide. Two symptoms at once appeared in him: a nervous diarrhea (identification with the suicide. TaHon!) and the obsession to indulge in onanism with the fantasy of a girl taking her own life by poison. He had promised the girl to prepare the poison for her and now had to pass through severe mental conflicts in his laboratory not to carry out her wish, because of the suspicion mentioned. He decided to give her another powder so that he might learn her purpose, and finally furnished her with sodium nitrite. How great was his con- sternation to learn soon after this that the girl had committed suicide with potassium cyanide ! A new double situation had arisen for Alpha which left every door and every avenue open to the doubt whether he had actually given her the sodium nitrite or perhaps — by mistake — potassium cyanide. Is he the girl's mur- derer or had she procured the poison somewhere else? This question has never been answered and has remained, ever casting up anew the floods of guilt to drive the mills of his parapathy, unsolved at the bottom of his psyche. And from time to time merely a watchful dream like the following throws him into a state of acute terror: V. A postman brings me a summons to the court. I have to answer to a charge of murder by poison. . . . The second experience was fully as unpleasant as the other. A young girl came to Dr. Stekel one day and said that she had just saved herself by using all her force from being strangled in the clutches of our patient. She had previously learned from him that he was having treatment here and now begged to be advised what she should do. Dr. Stekel explained to her as much as was necessary, and I then learned from the patient that the girl, when he wanted to have coitus with her, had offered resistance, and in a 48 SADISM AND MASOCHISM rage he lost control of himself and began to choke her. While she was with Dr. Stekel, he was fast asleep. . . . Alpha has an immoderate desire to make good. The will to power residing in every person attained an excessive pathological degree early in him as a consequence of his physical inferiority toward his companions of the same age, as well as of his ugliness complex. Alpha has developed fantasies of unlimited power over his environment. He is also wholly infantile in this, and in his fantasy places himself back in the time of his being "sole ruler." For he felt it bitterly even in his school days that "at home he was the Lord Himself and in the school a nobody." The strongest motive force in these fantasies came from the thought of his father's loss of power. He wanted to be at any price a man of force. ... His nose played a great part in his ugliness complex. He imagined that his nose was too long. He did not get rid of this idea until through a cosmetic operation he had his nose made to suit him. One might speak here of a castration complex (displacement from below to above), but another interpretation of the exag- gerated reaction on the ground of his slight defect in good looks seems much more plausible. The patient states thus that once (fifteenth to sixteenth year) he found in his mother's drawer a photograph of an officer who had a strikingly long nose. He immediately conceived the fantasy (cf. page 35) that the officer was an archduke and a former lover of his mother and that — perhaps he was the illegitimate son of this man. Analysis showed that he had undergone the operation chiefly for the purpose of removing once and for all the stigma of his "illegitimate" origin. This way of considering it (I have long ago pointed to this motive force in the nose complex) explains also the excessive affect toward the small defect in beauty. It is significant that he never spoke to his mother of the picture of the officer which had such vital interest for him and so pre- served for himself a constant source of doubt. His will to subjection is just as strong as his will to power. The patient describes the transformation of the will to power into its opposite in the following manner: *T was whipped so often that I did not know how else to help myself than to try to conceive the punishment as something pleas- ant, especially upon those occasions where I had to submit myself A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATHY 49 voluntarily to chastisement. The unpleasant character was thus stripped from the punishment and the latter made morally absurd. As time went on, I changed the pain consciously and purposely into pleasure and at last experienced the latter at the mere thought of blows." A dream illustrates this: 7. I am in the waiting room of a doctor who has discovered a new method of treating parapathy. He goes under the finger nail with a needle and in this way gets an electric contact with the nerves. The doctor appears — she is Mrs. Helene v. K. She begins the operation and says: "It will hurt!" I say: "Not without ethyl chloride !" and think : We chemists ought to deserve some- thing. She goes to the cabinet and comes back with a Pravaz's syringe. I say: "Now wait; I see we can't do it that way!" and want to fetch the ethyl chloride myself. I kiss her good-by, very heartily, and think : That is the way the women are, first they want to torture one, then they are kind. . . . "It will hurt," is said here by the female object, who is identi- fied with the analyst (transference). It is a question of getting rid of the pain. Since the woman is not able to do this, the patient does it himself, not without remarking that the women who "want to torture one" then become love objects. The will to submission was also a reaction of conscience. We should not forget that Alpha, despite his wide-reaching infantilism (perhaps really on account of it), was religions. Indeed, we were able during the investigation of his daydreams to determine that he would several times a day repeat mechanically the words : "And forgive us our trespasses" or, "And lead us not into tempta- tion." His frequent refraining from food was also religiously determined, imposed upon himself in order to "starve out his instinct." The gastric symptoms from which he suflFered frequently were often regular sensations of hunger. We have to seek therefore one root of our patient's gastric disorder in the religious-ascetic tendency, which led to fasting. We will take this opportunity to confirm the fact that the religiousness which is met with in our patient has an important function to perform in his psychic economy: he needs it as a restraint for his overpowerful anti- social impulse. His dream again aflfords an illustration: 8. I am in the primeval forest. A high board path leads through the wood. It is a yoga road. A rnan with a beautiful full 50 SADISM AND MASOCHISM black beard (like the Communist leader T.) and a host of disciples (fellow pupils?) are treading this way of penance. I hasten be- fore them out of curiosity and desire for knowledge. Suddenly the path is at an end, hanging free in the air at a height of about twenty meters ; I therefore return and leave the pilgrims. I reach a lower spot, spring into the thicket, and climb to earth. I do not reach it, for suddenly this picture is interrupted and tigers, lions, all the creatures of the jungle, swamp, malaria, and so on, arise as the dangers of the earth's surface. . . . The dream interprets itself. Will to power ("I hasten before them" . . .) and atonement; height and depth; further, the struggle which our patient carries on against the bestial and mor- bid in his own nature, all find plastic representation here. The cannibalistic complex belongs also to the sadistic manifesta- tions. We recall the patient's behavior in his earliest years (bit- ing). The parapathy caused a regression back as far as these years. We find even in the sixteenth to the eighteenth year onan- ism fantasies in which cannibalistic scenes appear. One such fantasy from this period reads : VI. I am very rich, have a submarine boat. I carry off women to a lonely island in the South Seas. The fantasy seems too im- moral; I change the woman whom I have just carried away into a rather old, fat prostitute. I have hewn out of the rock on the island a place where I can take up my abode ; there I flog the prostitute and afterward commit cannibalistic acts. First I cut out the breasts, after some days pieces from the anal region. Finally the prostitute is killed (choice of prostitute because at all events it does no harm with such a person). Here ejaculation. VARIATIONS OF FANTASY VI (a) Similar local situation. Find a shipwrecked person on the beach. She is cultured, intelligent, refined (like my mother). I bind her, whip her, and in the end rape her. I would let her live, but I am afraid that she will betray me. So I cut off her tongue and eat it. Then stab the bound woman through the heart. Ejaculation. (b) Situation as in Wedekind's Schloss Wetter stein. Suicide of a woman before my eyes out of despair for her misfortune. Ejaculation. In this connection the following impulsive action of the patient may be considered : Whenever his wife spoke of hunger or thirst, he felt as if he A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATHY 51 must kill her. I traced this, supported by the material, upon the pathway of a cannibalistic reflex, a conception which in my opinion does not fall outside the picture. (The patient associates to the word hunger: Hunger — Hungary — savage people — Mongols — Tartars — Huns — Avars — ate raw flesh, which they pressed under the saddle.) Analysis showed that the cannibalistic complex, the idea of having indulged in human flesh, constituted the further root of the nervous stomach disorder. This complex, too, which demonstrates the measure of his psychosexual regression, as the analysis revealed, had its deepest root in the attitude toward the mother and sister. What do we learn from the analysis of the symptoms of re- gression in our patient? His psychic regression occurred in a phylogcnetic as well as in an ontogenetic sense. A phylogenetic regression (atavism) is represented, for example, by the patient's sadism associated with cannibalism; atavistic is also his custom of giving inanimate ob- jects human names and treating them as it alive (animism) . Thus, for instance, he had a harem of musical instruments, which he had gathered together in a sort of collecting mania. A bugle horn was called Poldi, violins had the names Erika and Mizzi ("blond and brunette") ; the mandolins and guitars also had their human names. Alpha could play but little, but he was always buying new instruments, in the hope that sometime he would master them. . . . We may observe the ontogenetic regression in the fantasy of the mother's womb. Many things testify to its existence. Even the manner of sleeping, which the patient retained up to the present, was significant. He lay drawn in a heap (his knees touching his chin), covered over his head; chairs had to be placed around his bed, or he would push the table up to the edge of the bed. Plea"?- urable fantasies of being buried alive also belong here; thoughts, furthermore, of being born again; finally, the sleeping obsession, which meant for him the happiness of being hidden and of total oblivion to the world. A phenomenon of regression is also the widely ramified and in- tense infantilism, which we have presented in detail. RESULTS OF THE ANALYSIS We have learned to know in the course of the analysis so many of the patient's manifestations that fall outside the 52 SADISM AND MASOCHISM picture of the ordinary parapathy that it seems not unimportant to ask whether and in how far we may have a paralogy here before us. I indine on the basis of the material to the opinion that this is a borderland case between a parapathy and a paranoid form of schizophrenia. For the paralogy speak : (a) the breaking through into consciousness of most of the pathological complexes, as, for example, the GEdipus complex, cannibalism, and the like; (b) the absolutely egocentric emotional attitude toward the world about him; (c) the, for so long a time, unmodifiable character of the ideas : "Women have power over my well-being," and ''Women will not grant me pleasure of their own free will, therefore I have to destroy them" ; (d) the attacks of rage; (e) the far-reaching splitting of consciousness. Indications against assuming a pronounced paralogy: (a) absence of intellectual gaps; (b) the correction of the paranoid obsessive ideas as the effect of analysis. We must distinguish two groups of parapathic phenomena, which are antagonistically opposed to each other in accordance with the law of bipolarity. The active component alternates usually periodically with the passive, while the former, because it is antisocial in its direction, falls under repression to break through again if a pathological situation arises. We find in the entire development of the case no point of time, or almost none, in which any sort of a middle course was taken (for example, neither sadistically nor masochistically). The affects swing from one pole to the other, and according to the ampli- tude of the affect there is a more or less crass development of the individual symptoms. The patient came to us for help in an unbearable situation : we must save him from his murderous impulse. Everything seems to assure us that this task has been accomplished. We have indeed seen that he was about to yield to the pressure and as a consequence to be thrust from human society. The course of the analysis revealed to us that our conception of A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATHY 53 the pathogenic role of the marriage contract was a correct one. After we had removed the artificial compulsion of his marriage, the hostility of the patient toward his wife shrank to a mini- mum. He gave up for the second time living with her and con- tinued at last in a relationship with a girl fairly satisfactory to him. He is thinking of marriage at his own level with a loved object. The constant change of domicile (and also of place of work) noticeable in the latter time, as well as the tendency to give up favorable sexual ties and to return to the wife, w^as brought to an end by Dr. Stekel through his pointing out upon the basis of the dream material the central position of the father complex in the psychology of this case. The patient admitted when urged that he really is inclined to effect out of every affair that is erotically satisfactory to him an escape to the father. I was able fully to confirm Dr. Stekel's assumption. The patient's father, as we know, lived in good circumstances with his younger daughter, while our patient had to bear alone the entire bitterness of the struggle for existence. He wanted to take the place with the father of wife, friend, daughter. His secret life plan was to come to the undisputed possession of the father over his sister's dead body, share his home, look after his com- fort, occupy the center of his interest. . . . Hear what his dream says : 9. I am living with my father. We manage together a large house. A new maidservant has just come and is being initiated by the lady of the house, whom I cannot or will not see. I am explaining dreams to my father. He tells me that he is going to be shaved by a hairdresser (in the dream). I explain the hairdresser as homosexual attitude. That he is to be shaved, I interpret as masochistic. My father then dis- appears; I go seeking him through all the rooms, for I fear that he might commit suicide on account of the bringing of his complexes into consciousness. I ask the maid, whom I meet in the second room, whether she has seen the master; she an- swers somewhat meaninglessly. I then find my father. He is lying in bed in the next room. I talk to him about uncon- scious animal instincts and awake. . . . The language of the dream is clear. The new servant is the 54 SADISM AND MASOCHISM patient himself. The interpreting of the dream relates to his attitude toward his father. He seeks the father in women (maidservant). What she herself offers him is ''meaningless" for he has no desire for it. That ideal change of residence (to the father) to which his instinctive ego urges him he cannot effect, and everything which he has undertaken has held him from his secret goal. Therefore the depression, the unrest, irritability, and enmity toward his environment. The passage is interesting in which the patient is afraid his father might ''commit suicide on account of the bringing of his complexes into consciousness. . . The patient here expresses his own fear that the becoming conscious of his attitude toward his father may cause his pathological father complex to dis- appear. The dream is carried along by the thought of seeking for the father. In the dream he informs his father of the homosexuality and the masochism, paraphilias which until this time had kept him bound with parapathic chains to the father. The basic feature of this dream is the tendency to annul the work done by the analyst in resolving the difficulties. Alpha, convinced through dreams and other material, has to accept these connections. He has recognized the bipolar attitude toward the father, but particularly the fateful role of the homosexual bondage to him; also the fact that if he could not have the father's love all for himself he at least wanted his money. He used to come to the father on every occasion to borrow money, which then he would foolishly waste in the collection of instruments. He wanted unconsciously to ruin himself so that then he would have to be supported by the father. Inasmuch as he considered himself the immediate cause of his father's unhappy marriage, he felt himself some- how under obligation to make up to him for it. He wanted to accomplish this in an infantile manner, through a homo- sexually masochistic surrender. The transformation into pleasure, when a child, of the pain which he had suffered in being whipped helped to establish this attitude toward the father. The fundamental feature of the patient's sexuality may therefore be given more precise statement as follows : Heterosexual (mother fixation) : sadistic. A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATHY 55 Homosexual (father fixation) : masochistic. The persistence of the sadomasochism and the use of it in the parapathy brought about the following circumstances: (a) pathogenic experiences and traumata; (b) permutation into the CEdipus situation; (c) the criminal complex nurtured from the secret life plan ('*to the father over the sister's dead body"). The analysis was ended with the discovery of these connections. Then occurred what is not at all rare, that the patient made use of the results of the analysis to form a new pathological system and for some time destroyed his hoped-for psychic peace of mind. He felt within him the effects of the analysis and was aware of the fluctuation of the affect which had been dammed up about his own ego. Then he committed two impulsive acts, which threw a particular light upon the manner in which analytic insight may affect a seriously parapathic individual. Scarcely had the attitude toward the father become clear to him when he composed the following letter, in obedience to an incomprehensible impulse, to a lawyer accused of homosexuality (and then acquitted) ; the letter was however not sent. My Dear Doctor: I permit myself to approach you with the request that you will advise me in what way it would be possible for me to enter a society of similar feeling. I am twenty-eight ( !) years old, a student, formerly an officer. Though long aware of my nature, my training has thus far prevented me from seeking that society to which my feelings would urge me. The progressive development of my study of nature has made me more and more conscious of the want of logic in my manner of thinking, until I have resolved to convince myself ad oculos just how things are with my associates in feeling. I have observed in coffeehouses that often, as far as external appearance goes, highly intelligent men because of their natural disposition have to associate with persons quite uneducated and certainly not all that could be desired ethically. I take fresh hope from this. To be able to be a friend to a man of this sort in place of those uncultured fellows, this would be the joy of my life — and to this is attached the realization of my hopes. 56 SADISM AND MASOCHISM If you would support me with your advice, I should be greatly obliged to you. Do it, my dear Doctor! If you would bring peace and rest to a human heart which after years of striving, of self-consuming grief, is at the end of its strength, then without doubt you have in your hand the power to do it. With sincere regards . . . What has happened? The advocate (an elderly gentleman), who is plainly a father imago and whom he does not know, is used now by our patient to stage a new pathological situation. He offers himself to the man in place of the rude fellows with whom the man has hitherto had to do. This impulsive action, which bears obvious paralogic traits, revealed itself as a symptom of a new, so-called "analytic para- pathy" (Stekel), as an attempt to reduce the efforts of the analyst to absurdity. I enlightened the patient regarding this and he found himself decidedly better. I must frankly confess that at the first moment when the letter came to my attention I considered the possibility of an aggravation. Dr. Stekel reassured me. The result of the enlightenment and the facts which I have meanwhile gathered myself proved to me likewise that no other symptom approaches this as a manifesta- tion of defiance, with the purpose of maintaining the appearance of illness. Since with our patient the amplitude of the affect was indeed a large one, the symptom expressed itself in the man- ner described. It was the same thing with the transference. He displaced upon me the attitude toward his father, and I was compelled to allow much to be expended upon me which was designed for the father. In the letter to the homosexual lawyer, which he eagerly presented to me, there was an unmistakable allusion to his readi- ness to be a sexual object also for me, that he might attain that pleasure for which he had waited (unconsciously) for years. . . If you would bring peace and rest to a human heart which after years of striving, of self -consuming grief, is at the end of its strength, then without doubt you have in your hand the power to do it. . . He had to deny himself this pleasure with me exactly as once with his father. Then the ''negative transference" promptly appeared, which at first was unnoticed by me, but later led to an interesting and, as I believe, instructive intermezzo. A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATHY 57 I had observed for several days a peculiar depression in my patient. He could give me no satisfactory answer to my questions in regard to it. When I looked at him, he turned away. He was very scornful of Professor P., who had at one time treated him without result, and said that a physician like him "should be put to death." The peculiar, reserved attitude of my patient made me fear, despite the best understanding between us, that he was nursing some secret design against me. I knew absolutely no reason why he might have carried out any hostile action toward me, besides he always expressed himself with praise for the method and the result ; but since his behavior toward me continued to disturb me, I decided to investigate the situation more ener- getically. It was at a time when Alpha was visiting me repeatedly for all sorts of advice at the most impossible times, early in the morning and at night, and demanding my attention with the words, *'It is urgently necessary that I speak with you." A dream also revealed his criminal attitude toward my person : 10. Am walking with Dr. Gutheil in a suburban quarter. It is night. We are seeking something. We are already at the end of the street, but have not found what we are looking for; then we return. At a house Doctor Gutheil springs up upon a facade (about one and one-half meters), but is suddenly hurled back into the middle of the street by an invisible force, as by an electric current of high voltage. Possible that he jumped back himself because he felt pain. I am terribly frightened. My physician is wounded. A criminal stands in the middle of the street. I am afraid that he will also fall upon us. But this does not happen, for I call "Watchman," and people come. The dream is to be understood as bipolar. Love and hatred are the determinants of the attitude of the patient to the analyst. The "criminal" of the dream is the symbol of the patient's criminal idea. This idea, that is, the purpose to put the analyst out of the way, we have not yet discovered, although the analysis is a1 an end (". . . We are seeking something. We are already at the end of the street, but have not found what we are looking for. . . ."). The "watchman" is the symbol of the always alert moral consciousness of the patient, which consciousness has been engaged in the constant struggle against the "criminal" in his psyche and tries to prevent the "attack"; that is, the breaking through of the criminal impulses. I would perhaps not have been aware at this time of the whole significance of the negative transference, had chance not willed 58 SADISM AND MASOCHISM that Dr. Stekel * a short time before at a meeting of the "Society of Independent Medical Analysts" in a paper upon the so-called "negative transference" had referred to individual cases of the transference of hatred upon the physician. This circumstance made it possible for me to recognize correctly the patient's atti- tude and to resolve the actual conflict at the right time. I might take this opportunity to stress the fact that this is an extreme case (as all of Alpha's emotions rise to the extreme), and in other cases the amount" of hatred in the transference is usually much less. I had the definite feeling one day that the crisis had come. Alpha shuffled into the room in an evident state of stupefaction, whereupon I had him lie down on the divan. He said dryly : *T was pointed out to my chief as making myself ridiculous be- fore the others, talking to myself in the closet. The people are making fun of me. The chief has threatened to dismiss me from the works. There are no positions to be had. I shall have to shoot myself. . . "What did you say in the closet?" "They complained also that I was after the director of the busi- ness. That I had said : *The director is a monarchist ; he should be put to death !' " "You seem to be suffering again from the murderous impulses. Did you not perhaps want to put me to death ?" The patient was not prepared for such a direct question. He sprang from the divan and said : "Yes, indeed ! For days I have been feeling a secret impulse to shoot you. In the meantime I have wanted to kill myself because of this thought. I do not know why I have wished to do this. As if you had taken something away from me without providing me with a substitute for it. The impulse was as difficult to sup- press as with my wife. . . . Besides, I wanted also to kill my father in order in that way to be free from him. . . ." I enlightened the patient concerning the impulse and referred particularly to the fact that the analysis had withdrawn the object from his criminal impulse, had paralyzed the impulsion to murder his wife, had unmasked the hatred toward the father, showing it as love — and he was trying to give some direction to the hate com- ponent, which now seemed to have no object (it serves to veil a love attitude painful to consciousness), the direction to be toward the analyst. It was a mere displacement, a ''transference/' and an attempt to free himself from the analyst, as parapathic as the A CASE OF COMPLICATED PARAPATHY 59 attempt to gain freedom from the father through murder. The end of the parapathy will make possible a conscious, purposeful rejection of the complexes which are now recognized. . . . The patient's condition improved again astonishingly after this. The secondary repression of analytic knowledge was hereby prevented; in about ten sessions in a space of four months I taught him rightly to use the knowledge of the analy- sis. He finished his dissertation, which was accepted, and began eagerly to study for his final degree. He lived in bachelors* quarters, in which he received the visits of his girl friend. I dismissed him at this point. I saw him again after three months; he had failed in one subject in his examination and was preparing himself for a second examination. He felt relatively well. The analysis had a progressive effect in checking the para- pathic as well as the paralogic, part of the psychic disturbance. The paranoid ideas disappeared ; the egocentric attitude yielded in part to the striving for a rational relation to society and for an objectivity in judgment; the patient also stopped talking to himself. A general tranquillity and a calmer adjustment in the choice of sexual object were all that we could achieve therapeutically in this difficult and complicated case XIII CASE HISTORIES All of man's power is won through conflict with himself and victory over himself. FiCHTE. One fact appears again and again in all the rich material which I have been able thus far to bring forward; all para- philias originate in a suppression of our natural dispositions. From the powerful restraint of the homosexual component arise many deviations and aberrations of the sexual life. The infantile forms the necessary accompaniment of this. I have indeed made the effort to prove how easily as a result of a too strong fixation upon the family a reversal of all sexual values may take place. The natural becomes sinful, kindness turns to hatred, the highest falls to the depths, and the lowest is exalted. Our need for love and hate vents itself upon our children. Thus we move in a closed circle and every new generation re- ceives from the old the tendency to parapathy. Sexuality enters into the strangest combinations; it seeks confederates even in the enemy's camp. I have hitherto spoken of masochistic men. Now I will describe the counterpart to the masochistic man — the sadistic woman. Case Number 27. Mrs. N. L., a beautiful slender woman, twenty-eight years of age, with sharply chiseled features, put herself into my care because of a difficulty which had brought her into the severest conflicts. She is the wife of a high aristocrat and lives a great part of the year upon an estate in the neighbor- hood of a small town. There she leads a blameless life at the side of her husband, and no one who visits her or knows her at home would suspect to what fearful passions she has yielded. She can stand it at home and with her husband, who idolizes her and grants her every wish, six months at the most, then she has to go 60 CASE HISTORIES 6i to a sanatorium or to a large hotel on the Riviera or to Switzer- land, to some house where a large company are gathered together in a free and easy manner. On the very first day of her arrival she makes a survey at table of all those present and . . . But I should like to have her speak for herself and of herself : **And I observe at once which of the gentlemen present will be my victim." "You mean, will fall in love with you?" "No, I do not mean that. Fall in love . . . that is a mere trifle. No ... I am a sadist. I seek the victim whom I am going to whip. . . "And you always find him and at the first glance? And have you never been in a sanatorium where you did not find a victim?" "I always find one. I usually find several victims. I have never yet been in a sanatorium where I have not secured a part- ner. But listen further : I exchange but one look with the gentle- men. I look at them all. My first glance is serious, cruel, and stern. Then I notice in many a man a sudden cringing and I know it at once ! The man will be my slave. . . ." "How does the acquaintance then come about?" "Oh, that soon happens. Sadists and masochists have a secret language. I might say a secret alliance with secret customs and secret agreement. We speak to each other after the meal, and the first rendezvous is usually arranged then. We say not a word of what we are going to do. I say to him harshly : 'Come this evening at nine or ten o'clock to my room !' I give him a master- ful look and go my own way. with no further word to him. If he wants to talk, I shake him ofif like a dog that would make itself a nuisance." "And he comes?" "He is sure to come at the appointed hour. He certainly comes ! Then I have him disrobe completely, while I remain dressed. I permit him neither to approach me, nor do I allow any caresses. He has to obey ; he undresses and throws himself at my feet. Now I strike him with the riding whip as hard as I can and as long as it is possible without being heard. He moans with pain or pleasure and writhes at my feet. Oh, I have seen at my feet proud, renowned men, shining lights in their profession, grateful and kissing my shoes with gratitude for the blows. I strike until the wales on their flesh are bleeding." "Do you experience great pleasure in this?" "Of course. Yet not so much as later when the man throws 62 SADISM AND MASOCHISM himself upon me and wants to possess me. Then I look at him scornfully, ridicule him. I notice how he squirms with passion, how desire robs him of the last vestige of masculine dignity. He begins to beg, to whimper, to twist and turn before me, pleading for the chief gratification. I remain cold, and this triumph affords me a voluptuous pleasure such as I can never experience in normal intercourse with my husband." "And he goes away without having possessed you?" "Always !" "Have you never found any one who will not do so ?'* "Oh, yes, many a one has first writhed in pain and then wanted to be strong and use force. Such a one succeeded beautifully. I was stronger than he and threatened if necessary to scream and cause a scandal. Many a one I have driven out of the door with my whip and forbidden him ever to come again. Believe me, these men then run after me like dogs. I could have asked any- thing of them; they were utterly in my power." "And have you never succumbed to your own desire?" "No ; this desire — you mean I suppose for sexual union — no longer exists then for me. I have it with my husband and now and then also with other men. Yet what is this feeble pleasure which I feel in normal intercourse compared with the indescrib- able bliss of such a sadistic act? The orgasm reaches such a height that I could not feel a stronger one. My whole personality seems exalted ; I seem to be proudly uplifted, at one with all my forces. And I have found that one has power only over the men to whom one does not completely surrender. All these men are my slaves even to-day and run after m.e. Because they have never possessed me, because they are always consumed in ardent desire for me, because they have learned to know my severity and longed afterward to enjoy also my tenderness." "And what do you expect from me and my medical art ?" "I want to be delivered from my illness. I have heard that people can be changed through hypnosis. You will *talk out' of me this crazy sadism. I am falling now into wretched embarrass- ment. In the sanatorium where I was last, a woman next door heard the cracking of the whip and seems to have observed some- thing through the keyhole. I was ordered by the director to leave the house immediately. Think if that comes to the ears of my husband ! My reputation and my position in society are en- dangered ! I want to be freed from my perversity — at any price whatsoever. I want to be a normal, healthy woman. . . ." CASE HISTORIES 63 I have reproduced the conversation because it affords us a surprising glimpse of the actual conditions of life and reveals also what frequently is going on behind the scenes of a sanatorium, and in what manner most wonderful cures take place. Naturally, hypnosis is not to be thought of in a case like this. Nothing but a rather long reeducation through analytic effort can be crowned with success. But one is often in a position, through knowing exactly the situation, to give good advice and point the way to another mode of life. So it was in this case. A thorough anamnesis brought to light very interesting material. The patient had really always been anaesthetic at coitus and had been able to bring to it only weak libido by the aid of fantasies. On the other hand, it was dis- covered that even in early years she. had had Lesbian relations with friends for a fairly long time. She was always infatuated with beautiful girls and the kiss of a charming friend is sweeter to her than that of the most attractive man. In fact, her strongest orgasm was associated with the kiss of a proud friend, for whose friendship she long had to sue. This friend remained cold and unapproachable for a long time, until one day they met each other and kissed. This kiss is unforgettable for her even to-day! She often dreams that she is a man, goes walking in men's clothes, has wished to go through a campaign as a soldier. She is bisexual with strongly marked homosexuality, which, however, is now strongly suppressed. She firmly resolved to be a normal woman and married her husband for this reason. This conflict with her own masculinity, to which she denies her libido, expresses itself in the specific scenes which she is always bringing about. She chastises a man and allows him to languish and faint with desire. It is the man in herself on whom she inflicts the punishment and whom she crushes, allows to perish with longing. Her sadism, apparently, is directed only against men. It is projected from within outwardly. At bottom she is sadistic toward her masculine component and masochistic as man. That means, the woman in her is sadistic, because she has to suppress the man; the man in her obtains his pleasure from masochistic motives. We shall meet this remarkable cleavage into the sadistic and masochistic instinctive tendencies again and again, and the double attitude must always be judged according to the condi- 64 SADISM AND MASOCHISM tion of bisexuality. Individuals who express all their instincts are rarely cruel. The original cruelty in man appears in the normal person only when feelings of pain enter under the in- fluence of unfulfilled aims. Cruelty for the pleasure of cruelty without inner motivation is one of the surest signs of severe degeneration and permits the ready diagnosis of congenital inferiority. It must be distinguished besides that the born criminal, for example, the terrorist, always rationalizes his sadistic tendencies and considers himself wronged by society. The experienced psychologist easily recognizes the transparency of the motivation, how it serves to conceal distaste for work, sadism, defective intelligence, which are hidden under the bril- liant phraseology of radicalism and often lend an appearance of social knowledge and understanding, but no more than an appearance. . . . Behind the wealth of social motives is con- cealed for the most part the poverty of the incorrigible attitude, which masks itself under the rallying words of great thinkers. The creative is absent from the motivation of sadism. It is quite different with the parapathic sadist, who displays great intelligence even in his specific scenes, whose inner con- flict never ceases, and who is driven to sadism from internal unhappiness. It is never external circumstances that make sadists of parapathics. The person may be rich, independent, attractive, recognized. But he fights his own foes within him ; he has to carry on a bitter warfare with his homosexual im- pulse. He beats himself in the chastisement of his partner. One might compare the sadistic scenes among homosexuals. There, too, they have a functional sense. He who has come to recognize the abundant fantasy activity will not be sur- prised to learn that the man who is beaten may represent a woman, and conversely. The masochist or the sadist — we have learned that these two tendencies represent only one tendency and that there are only sadomasochists — always strives however to portray the struggle of his impulses through a plastic picture in a specific scene. There is nothing essentially strange in the fact that the libido then joins itself to this scene; that is, to the conflict concerning the libido. Whatever has any connection with the object of our sexual aim is libidinally toned. If I repress a libidinal goal CASE HISTORIES 65 idea, the means of the repression becomes the bearer of the libido. This is most easily explained through an example from everyday life. Occupation with pornography may proceed negatively or positively ... it always remains the same and brings the same reward of pleasure, only that the latter at one time is conscious, at another concealed. The collector of pornographic pictures may derive his erotic stimulation from his collection and permit himself to be directly excited, if he does it frankly for this purpose. The moralist may make such a collection in order to combat pornography; he may look at every picture with indignation, register his disapproval of it, challenge it, urge the state authorities to action; he, too, has drawn his pleasure premium from it. Thus libido is bound exclusively with the activity and not with the sort of activity upon sexual things. The most im- portant fact is what is behind the things. The impossibility of realizing their sexual fantasies compels parapathics to mask, to conceal, to reverse, symbolically to distort, their sexual guiding line. Behind this dramatic con- duct the unfulfilled wish hides itself, which represents the strongest driving force in man's psychic life. A great longing dominates all persons. They seek the one who will understand and comprehend, who can divine their secret wishes. The more a person shrinks from the realization of his inmost thoughts, so much the more will the hidden yearning strive toward discovery. Numberless are the indi- viduals who are forever complaining that they are misunder- stood and misjudged, that they have found no one who has entered into their mental life. This complaint very frequently proves to be sexually determined. There are instinctive im- pulses which desire recognition and satisfaction. It is a fact all too well known that every dissatisfied person is a cruel per- son. He who is contented is happy and in most cases good, too. Unsatisfied desires make for evil. . . . And so the parapathic who remains caught in the infantile comes to think that the miracle will happen. But the miracle means : The person will come who will discover what I want without my having to ask him ! Satisfaction will come to me; 66 SADISM AND MASOCHISM I need not achieve it. The benumbed aggressive force expects to fmd a substitute through the aggression of another: My weaknesses shall be compensated through the strength of the other person. He shall compel me to become happy. He shall force me to sin. Many sadistic acts are committed because the environment does not recognize v^hat the sadist v^ants. I will give here the most remarkable of all examples : Case Number 28. Ferdinand K., a youth of twenty-one years, was a constant source of anxiety to his parents, whose only child he was. Pampered and spoiled by father and mother, he became a genuine tyrant in the home, whose will had always to be done or there were frightful scenes. In their perplexity the parents sent the boy away from home when he was sixteen years old. They heard only good of their intelligent son from his teachers and his boarding-house mistress. He learned readily, then entered a business, where he likewise gave satisfaction in every respect. But his uncle had in the home town a large and very profitable store, was already tired of work, and was looking around for a successor. Ferdinand should be the one. They thought he had now passed through his years of indiscretion and it would work. He came home, went into his uncle's business. There was peace for only a few weeks ; then the old scenes were revived, but they took on much worse forms than previously. Formerly he had only wanted his desires to be gratified. Now he expected his mother to divine his wishes. If she gave him the correct advice he was calm, but if she advised him wrongly there were frightful scenes. He would begin to strike wildly about, fall into un- speakable rages, and threaten to do something dreadful. One Sunday morning Ferdinand was still in bed, and his mother came into the room with his coffee. He had been wishing to himself that his mother would bring him his coffee in bed. But she put it as usual on the table. He leaped out of bed in his shirt and flung first the cup and then the whole breakfast to the floor, so that everything broke in a thousand pieces. Then he demolished the chair. And now he began systematically to destroy the entire room, until there was not a whole object left in it. The attack was like that of a raving maniac. I met him in this state. He had gone back to bed growling and stayed there quite nega- tivistic, would answer none of my questions. He turned himself toward the wall and was silent. All that his mother could say was CASE HISTORIES 67 that the evening before he had been very nice to her. He lay down upon her bed and gave her a kiss. It had already become plain to me what the young man wanted. The whole comedy with the coffee cup that should have come into the bed was a sym- bolic displacement of great desires upon small ones with sym- bolic affect value. The real thought was : "Oh, if my mother would come into bed with me and be unrestrainedly affectionate to me ! Why does she not discern my secret wishes ? I can never tell them to her. She must come to me and must discover them." His inner thought as his mother set the coffee upon the table and not upon the bed was : "She will never come to me in bed. I hinted to her last evening what it was that I wanted. But she does not want to understand me, because she . . . does not love me." And now all the demons of hate are let loose. Only love that has been rejected can be so ferocious. We have really no right to speak of sadism if ruthless actions have been performed toward persons concerning whom the feeling is neutral. Sadism means cruelty toward individuals whom one loves ! Hate and love are bipolar forms of expression of one and the same feeling, only with the distinction that love endeavors to subject the partner through pleasure, and hatred through pain. "If you will not love me, then you must feel the power of my hatred." The chief thing, however : "You must feel me and feel through me and occupy yourself with me. . . ." Cruel actions toward persons concerning whom one is in- different betray a serious mental disturbance. They lead us to conclude that there is social and psychic inferiority. The smash- ing of objects is a substitute action and actually takes the place of killing the mother. How many deeds of violence have been prevented through such symbolic discharge of energy! Let us turn back to our patient. I advised the mother to send the son from home. Experience had proved that separation from the parents worked very favorably upon him. But that would not do now, they thought. They had tried to do this, but the youth did not want to leave home. Then I counseled a heroic measure. The mother and perhaps the father should go away, and the patient ought not to know where they were. The poor mother had the force to follow my advice. She quickly packed a small trunk and stole out of the house by the back way, so that the young man should not notice it. Never have I experienced any- thing that has shaken me more ! A mother who had to flee from 68 SADISM AND MASOCHISM her only son! She hastened to the railway station and visited relatives in another city, where she hid herself for several weeks. The son's conduct was very interesting. He got up, dressed, and locked himself in the water-closet, which he would not leave. The father trembling asked me what he should do. Should he not implore him? Should he use force and have the locksmith sum- moned? The boy threatened to throw himself out of the window if he did that. I was able calmly to advise the father to leave him alone. He was really playing with his parents' hearts and would quiet himself if he noticed that no one was troubling himself about him. He came out of his fortress after six hours, went into the room, and to the table. He asked for his mother. He heard then that she had gone away and would not return for a year. Where ? No one knew ; she had not wanted to tell. Now I witnessed the strongest example of stubbornness that I have ever seen. The young man stood for thirty-six hours — thirty-six — before the table, did not move, would not eat, gave no response to his father's words or his pleading, nor when the other members of the family addressed him. Like a statue Ferdinand stood there and did not move. He may have felt hunger and weariness. But the pleasure of the thought that his father must be sufifering still more helped him over the severe period. Again the weak father wanted to telegraph the mother to come back and even beg the son's forgiveness. But the uncle, instructed by me, remained implacable and dragged the father away, so that Ferdinand remained alone the entire night. I do not know whether he lay down and went back to the table only when he heard footsteps. Whenever a servant came in, he was found in the same position. Finally, after thirty-six hours, his defiance was broken. He ate greedily and was persuaded to leave the city. He went abroad and was entirely compliant with his father's wishes. He took a position; there was again no fault to be found with his industry and obligingness. But he still wrote never a word to his mother, A long, affectionate letter came each week to his father. He accepted no money from home, nor did he want any mention of his mother made in the letters. His hatred toward her, the poor innocent woman, who had given him his whole life only her self- sacrificing love, was ineradicable. Away from home he was well. He was sick merely when his relations to his parents were in queS' tion. He was "parent ill," as I should call it. . . . CASE HISTORIES 69 We will learn of this example and separate cruelty and sadism from each other. Cruelty is a symptom of degenera- tion. The criminal, who represents a psychopathological in- feriority, is ferocious out of love for ferocity. Sadism is a paraphilia and means cruelty only toward those whom one loves. . . . We will now proceed to the discussion of the most important question : How does it happen that the sadist's hatred is directed toward the family, that it then leaps over from the beloved members of the family upon strangers, who are substitute images of the family and who must fulfill every condition; namely, that they are loved and love the sadist? The reason for this attitude would have to be discovered individually and socially. It must involve tremendous social forces which strive in this way in the individual for expression. I have already laid stress upon the fact that the parapathic vacillates between the two poles : family and humanity. Or still more closely: family and state. He saves himself from the individual conflicts in social ones. He is fixed upon the family and is not in a condition to accomplish his social mission. He becomes an asocial being. He develops into a recluse, an autoerotist, an anarchist, a fetishist, a masochist . . . but he comes to avoid everything which would lead him to be again a social person and to found a family. H he makes the at- tempt he is unlucky and comes to grief through it, produces children who become parapathic, fresh victims of the conflict between impulse and restraint. It is customary to regard the family as the foundation of the state, as the basis of society. Our investigations reveal to us the opposite and demonstrate once more the bipolarity of all phenomena. The family is the enemy of the state. There is no greater contrast than the family and the community. The family is the stronghold of individuality; it is the antith- esis of the individual and of the single member against the group. Because it consists of a close association of persons, it seems as if the family were the beginning of the social. We see also how the parapathic clings to the family, which appears to him solely as the extension of his ego, the field of resonance of his hypertrophic ego mania. It is therefore a 70 SADISM AND MASOCHISM phenomenon easily understood that in the conflict raging at the present time between family and state the family reveals the tendency to reduce the group in size and make it ever more sharply asocial in form. The system of one or two children is only the inevitable outcome of the individual position in the struggle against the whole body, as it takes place in the border of the family. We have seen that all sadists and masochists and fetishists, too, are slaves to the family. What they are unable to achieve is release from the family. Their illness itself drags them away from the group of the normal and makes of them an individuality, a single one, in appearance. But each one wants to be this unique individual, this case the like of which has never been before ! Each wants to be the only one in the family, also, and has been the only one in the family either always or at certain definite periods (for example, during an illness). The primary attitude was: Hatred toward society (strangers, others) and love to the family (as the mirror of the ego) . The more such persons wish to overcome the hatred toward society and transform themselves into social beings, the greater is the resistance of the asocial forces that would rivet them to the family for all time. The hate must then direct itself against the family. These persons reverse their attitude and it be- comes : Hatred toward the family and love to the group. They all make the vain attempt to conquer the love through hate, which, however, binds them ever more strongly to the family. It is very probable, furthermore, that behind all sadistic acts fantasies are concealed which arise from an old infantile attitude toward the family. The sadist is always tak- ing revenge upon his family because it has made him an asocial being. All founders of a religion, prophets, philanthropists, disavow the family (given keenest expression in Ibsen's Enemy of the People)} I cannot finish the subject of sadism without making men- tion further of symbolically cruel acts. I could relate some cases of symbolic lust murder which I have had occasion to ob- serve. I have already emphasized the fact that the paraphilia of passion murder is exceedingly common. At any rate, the impulse to murder the beloved person is CASE HISTORIES 71 stronger and more frequent than one would believe a priori without more exact knowledge. Zola has given us in L'assom- moir an exhaustive representation of passion murder, which he can have drawn only from his own breast. He was, as we know, an obsessive parapathic, and all obsessive parapathics are really criminals who have conformed to the restraints of civi- lization. The important question is : Does the crime concern the person who stands in the center of the action, or is it a symbolic act in which infantile thoughts of revenge belonging in the circle of the family are carried out? We will allow some examples of cowardly lust murderers who content themselves with symbolic acts to pass in review : Case Number 29. F. M., an officer of thirty-four years of age, has intercourse with prostitutes in a remarkable manner. He is im- potent with women, and a bashfulness which he cannot overcome prevents him from forming a relationship. From time to time he has an irresistible impulse to visit a prostitute. He is in inde- scribable excitement ; he is trembling and vibrating all over. He always comes to the brothel resolving this time to have intercourse in normal manner and to conduct himself normally. But at the moment that he is alone with the prostitute an inexplicable fear seizes him which is stronger than he. He is afraid to be alone with her and explains that he would much rather have intercourse with her if she would call one of her colleagues. She does so. Often he grows quiet, especially if the onlooker is very forceful. But if the person summoned is a delicate, weak girl, he needs still another woman. Then he performs coitus without special orgasm, pays, and leaves the house depressed, dissatisfied, ashamed. This strange manner of behavior is not his wish, but belongs among the forms of sexuality, and its existence to-day among savages demonstrates to us its significance. It is to be explained as the transference of one upon two to bring about an orgy (pluralism). (Certainly such a number of overtones are also present in the libidinal desire, because the pluralism likewise of the act in the family, limited to persons in which it may have expression, suppressed in the other members, becomes in all its strength a common act of a number of individuals. The orgy is the participation of the children in the parents' sexuality, the ex- pression of the effort to transform sexuality to a social play.) It is much more, as this patient's dreams prove, the case of a lust 72 SADISM AND MASOCHISM murderer who fears himself and is afraid that in the orgasm he might strangle or stab his partner. He needs the presence of the women for his own and the girl's protection. It is for this reason that only the strong girl is a sufficient protector. He never, generally speaking, stays alone in a room with a woman. He is immediately seized with a nervous trembling, which he cannot explain for he has no intimation of his paraphilia. He belongs also to those people who do not notice their dreams. He merely knows that every morning he awakes with a dull, heavy head. He cannot at first orient himself. He staggers to the washstand and pours cold water over his head. It is as if his head were swim- ming, as if he would suddenly fall to the floor. Violent headaches torment him till late in the morning. All persons who do not control their dream life and are not willing to know what is going on within them manifest such symptoms. One often hears such people say that they never have dreamed.^ That is of course nonsense. Every one dreams without interruption the whole night through, beginning to dream the moment the eyes are closed, usually even a few minutes before (hypnagogic pictures) ; one dreams on a while after one has awakened, often for some seconds, frequently long minutes (hypnopompic images!). But persons who during the night live out their wild suppressed instincts, especially their criminal nature, make a great effort in the morning to forget what they have dreamed (Freud's repression). They first have to come to themselves, repress the images of the night, and permit the thoughts of the day to triumph over those of the night. The moment of repression they feel as a giddiness or a pressing back. On the other hand this repression produces the symptoms of pressure in the head : individuals have the feeling as if a band were encircling the head, as if something were trying to come out and force itself through the skull, as if the skull would burst, and so on. . . . Our patient had these manifestations, but he could report noth- ing from the dreams of the night. Now a certain training belongs to the observation of dreams. Most people dream, give very fleet- ing attention to the dreams, and have forgotten them in the morn- ing. Even when they have been requested by the physician to notice the dreams, they perhaps wake in the night, repeat the dream, say to themselves: "You need not write that down; you have remembered it very well" . . . and the next day the dream is completely forgotten. It requires a great effort of the will to CASE HISTORIES 73 give attention to the dream, when the entire psychic apparatus is so arranged as to forget it and at once repress it. Our patient, however, was a man of iron will. He undertook to seize his dreams and started on a chase after them. It was more difficult than he had imagined. But at last he succeeded, and the whole series of dreams unrolled itself before my eyes. I had told Mr. F. M. nothing of his illness, nor had I imparted to him what I suspected behind his pathological performance in the brothel. The first dream which he brought me read : I am quite alone with a girl in her room. She is lying stabbed in a pool of blood. I am afraid that I may be considered the mur- derer and flee from the room. A watchman notices me and says : **You have bloody hands." ... I defend myself and say I have killed a chicken. He looks at me suspiciously and lets me go on. Further observation showed that almost all his dreams were of this type. They always had to do with a murder which had been committed upon a prostitute ; there was always a court procedure in which he had to prove his innocence. Finally childhood memories appeared which strengthened the assumption that it was a case of infantile murder fantasies. He used to cut up dolls with a knife and imagined while doing it that the blood ran upon his clothing. He had day fantasies also as a boy in which he cut out the female genital. He belonged to those children who always want to see how people look inside. This was what he was always thinking about and seeking for. He became a medical student and would have liked to do operations. But he fainted away in the dissecting room. He could not look at dead bodies and blood. There has been since his youth a strong repression of the sadistic impulses, with transformation of them into horror of blood and disgust with everything connected with it. He could not eat rare roast beef nor look on when a chicken was butchered. Nevertheless, after his one year's voluntary service in the army, he performed duty as an officer. I saw him also before the war, into which he went with tremendous enthusiasm. Now he could put his sadistic disposition at the service of the fatherland. Only three weeks after his first engagement he returned, pre- senting the typical picture of war parapathy: fatigue, depression, bodily weakness, abulia, insomnia, sensitiveness to light and every sound, tendency to weeping. He was no longer able to sleep after the first battle, in which he had distinguished himself. His conscience plainly could not further endure the libidinal charge of his military activities. In 74 SADISM AND MASOCHISM his brief dreams he was always seeing himself thrusting his saber into the enemy's belly, and even by day he was constantly pur- sued by such visions. The condition passed away after three weeks ; he became composed, and as an instructor of recruits cer- tainly performed equally valuable service for his country. . . . He had lost his fear with prostitutes and had long given up having witnesses present. It was one of those rare cases in which sim.ply a short treatment and enlightenment sufficed for the cure. He saw at once that I was right, and at the close of the treatment handed me a wonderful, very sharp Norwegian knife. "Permit me to give you this knife with a confession and as a souvenir of the subdued murderer of women. I have always had this knife concealed upon me when I have gone to a prostitute. I had, to be sure, a motive for this. I might have to defend myself, if another man should attack me. I know now that this would have been the weapon with which I would have done the murder. I know myself now and need neither weapons nor as- surance through the presence of others. We will pass on to another case, which shows a displacement of the brutal action upon an animal. This displacement ex- plains to us fully a large number of similar cases. Case Number 30. Mr. K. H. always has a fowl with him when he goes to a brothel. This fowl he has to strangle before the eye£ of the prostitute; then he throws himself upon her and performs coitus with a great orgasm. Without the bird, he is completely impotent. In this case the fowl plays the role of the prostitute. He must strangle a living being, wring its neck. In his fantasy he does it to the prostitute, whereupon the pleasure-toned coitus ensues. Insistent questioning brings no knowledge of the con- nection existing here. He thinks only of the chicken and never of the woman. But finally he gives way and confesses that he had such fantasies already succeeding puberty, but without the fowl. He observed all women's necks, and it interested him to wonder whether their necks could be twisted. He attributes the origin of this passion to the reading of Zola's U Argent, where a scene of this kind is depicted. He was sixteen years old when he read this story. One frequently hears such statements from sadists or masochists. They acquired their paraphilia through the perusal of some work. This is naturally not correct. The scene had this effect upon them because it was already latent in them. They were attuned to the fantasy. The anamnestic examination of our CASE HISTORIES 75 patient's early years shows in fact that he had in his childhood a great interest in the wringing of the neck, and he remembers that a fairy story in which a twisted neck played a part made a great impression upon him. He had entirely forgotten these infantile scenes. Only through the analysis did they come to light. He also remembers that he tore all his sister's dolls to pieces at the neck. His mother informed him, when he wrote and asked her, that he had threatened at the age of four to wring the neck of his little sister as he had once seen it done to chickens. Thus a strong infantile impression was mixed with a comedy of displacement, which he had to repeat over and over again. The infantile im- pressions were forgotten, the woman became the secondary per- son, and the fowl was apparently the chief object. That is, he no longer was aware that his original tendencies were toward the murder of a woman. This idea was entirely repressed and be- longed to those forbidden things which he did not wish to see. The character picture was filled out through his being a strict vegetarian and the fact that the sight of raw meat, such as may be seen in meat shops, produced in him a feeling of disgust and nausea. (There are many such people; they are all sadists with repressed thirst for blood.) I have em.phasized the fact in my work upon fetishism that the preference for those who have had limbs amputated rests upon a similar mechanism. It is the principle of a "finished thing." I know several such specimens. In this case, too, the original idea was : I should like to cut both legs off a woman. Later, however, this idea was set aside and the desire for some one who had suffered amputation was rationalized through her gratitude and greater pleasure.^ Sadistic symbolic actions belong to the most remarkable phe- nomena of sexual psychopathology. A remarkable case, the knowl- edge of which I owe to a prostitute, has its place here : Case Number 31. A fifty-three-year-old, very elegant man is known among her associates as the sofa stabber. He goes only to those prostitutes who know his mania and are not afraid of him. He undresses himself, murmurs all sorts of wild but completely unintelligible words, throws himself upon the sofa, and stabs it through ever so many times with a knife. Then brief coitus, after which he lies for some time as if unconscious. . . . Numberless are the cases in which a slight insignificant ac- tion betrays the sadistic fantasy. There is the man who must 76 SADISM AND MASOCHISM always hold in his hand a ball of newspaper when he performs coitus. He squeezes this ball hard before the orgasm comes. Now it is a man who would like to choke his victim. Another parapathic presses his partner's arm until she has to cry out. The arm symbolizes for him the neck. Others seize the throat and pretend in fun that they might or should like to strangle it. I have already spoken of the love bite. It belongs almost to the inventory of normal love. But I know cases in which the bite has to be a bloody one if the orgasm is to be attained. Gnash- ing the teeth during coitus betrays the cannibalistic fantasy, which expresses itself also in the words : ^T love you so much I could eat you up." The necrophiliac desires the absolute im- mobility of his partner. The woman must resemble a dead person, for only thus will the orgasm come. More ideational sadism manifests itself in derision and humiliation of the woman embraced. The fantasy often re- veals itself through the exclamations during the orgasm. One man under my observation mocked the whole time during coitus : ''You lewd woman, you common whore, you beast, you common animal !" When the orgasm began he would call out, "Die, you canaille!" Thus it happens that men experience the greatest orgasm when they have intercourse with their wives after a dispute which has led to action. A highly esteemed, sensitively refined physician remained a bachelor because he always had to maintain the fiction of over- powering a woman in clothing. He threw his partner to the floor or the sofa and held her fast with iron hands so that she was unable to move. In bed or after suitable preparations he was impotent. Only the resistance stimulated him, and the overcoming of the resistance made him potent. Women who offered no resistance did not come into question. Here be- longs the type of Don Juan who ravishes women, and for whom they lose all charm as soon as they show that they are willing to surrender to him. The condition of his potency is the absence of sexual excitement in the woman. His libido sinks even during coitus when he notices that the violence is a gratification to the woman. An officer who suffered from a chronic gonorrhea revealed a strange combination. In order to avenge himself for his in- i CASE HISTORIES 77 fection, he infected a dozen women, all of whom he suddenly- overpowered without preparation. He boasted that he could win every woman. He did violence to her. He was very strongly built and knew how to break every opposition. He told me that this violence was necessary only the first time. Then all the women — without exception — would run after him. Even those he had infected had never reproached him. But there was no longer any fun in it for him, and he sought new victims. He was a pronounced despiser of women and named them all, every one, "prostitutes." ("Women are respectable only for their husbands. With a lover they drop every form of modesty, and the more they can roll about in bed the greater their satisfaction.") Not until a woman had committed suicide on his account (after being ravished) did his conscience awake and he become parapathic. A motive familiar to us showed itself in the analysis. His mother had been a nymphomaniac, and as a boy he had known of her shameless behavior. In most cases, however, the original sadism changes to maso- chism. These are the cases which I have described in my book on impotence. The relations to the family are not easy to find in all cases. They conceal themselves. Often the sadomasochist who is being analyzed take to flight when the knowledge begins to dawn. In most cases one succeeds in discovering the specific sadistic fantasy when one questions the patient concerning his onanism. Unfortunately most onanists are silent regarding these fan- tasies. One may safely say: Onanists who have not the courage to impart their specific fantasy are in large part sadists. If the sadistic ideas during onanism are unconscious, there may be constructed a picture of a serious parapathy in which a severe conflict is carried on against the onanism. The sources of the sense of guilt lie in the sadistic complex. Also inex- plicable feelings of anxiety, fear of people and of social con- nections, may have the same cause. The intelligent writer who describes the following clinical situation draws an excellent picture. The sadism appears only reluctantly in the memories. The experienced reader will recognize how it expresses itself parapathically in the patient's confession. SADISM AND MASOCHISM Case Number 32. My Life I was my parent's second child. My father was twenty-seven years old when he married my mother, four or five years younger. His most outstanding characteristics: Energy, restless activity, besides a slightly choleric temperament; as merchant so upright and with so little consideration for his profit that after the first indifference to material things, he saw with great concern the bad course of business gaining ground. Such impressions of the seri- ousness of life had their effect very early upon me, strengthened through the always clouded brow of my father, who never once in the family circle (beside me, one sister about two years older and one two years younger) was free from the pressing cares of business. I had no sunny childhood. I spent delightful hours mostly far from home surrounded by my playmates. My mother, a gentle, kind-hearted person of a profound nature, but reserved, never showed her great love to us children but restrained her feeling as well as her caresses. She, too, was surrounded by life's seriousness. Yet she was always ready to yield to our childish wishes, often greatly to our hurt. Too earnest for my years, I was held up to their children by our acquaintances as a model because of my "good manners," which were almost as charming as those of a girl. I showed more feminine characteristics than mas- culine ones at play, also. I preferred games that demanded great patience rather than courage and boisterousness. Yet there were occasional exceptions. I was a very lively boy, who passionately loved to read or to hear fairy tales and was seized with longing when I heard music. But evil impulses also soon appeared, thus a great tendency to steal, a habit which was cured only through stern lectures on the part of my father. I had to promise never to steal, and it was my proud ambition never in spite of all tempta- tion to break the "word of honor" which I had given, and of which I was vainly proud. I remember plainly, furthermore, to have noticed passing sadistic impulses at the age of six or seven. I attacked a younger child and felt great pleasure in ill-treating him. A second instance occurred in my thirteenth year, where I tried passionately to beat a girl of eight to ten years from the neigh- borhood (or to pull her hair). Then these desires also dis- appeared. But then began the most troubled period of my life thus far. In my thirteenth year I commenced to masturbate and CASE HISTORIES 79 through mechanical stimulation of the anus. I soon (even in my fourteenth year) began to feel the physical effects of my repeated masturbation and even psychically I suffered indescribably. I was afraid my secret might be discovered and began likewise to sup- press the desire as it attacked me, for I had to consider it some- thing very bad, reprehensible. No one knew anything about my torn and harassed state of mind ; no one, not even my parents, had any idea how much I was suffering. When frequent pollutions set in after this, I now thought myself very severely, perhaps incurably, ill ; I was too modest and shy to confide in any one, much rather fearfully guarded my ''secret." When alone I prayed to God in childish faith for healing, for deliverance from the pollutions, which I regarded as a ''discharge" that would endanger and shorten life. I wept in secret, implored, wrung my hands before God, promised never more knowingly to pollute myself, and waited in vain for my prayers to be answered. Then I began to doubt God's good- ness. I became a brooder and soon a convinced atheist. I sought through distractions to overcome the inner discord ; I had been learning to play the violin since I was eleven years old, and now I practiced with real fervor. At school I had become from a mediocre, a good student, and in the upper gymnasium a very good, student ; I was held up by my professors before every one as a pattern in "deportment" and in achievement. I felt myself frightfully miserable ; I envied every other "healthy" person; I was afraid my life could last but a few years, and then my parents would have to suffer the loss of their only son, of whom they were so proud. I naturally felt great need of intercourse with school fellows who were at the same level with me mentally. This had a very good effect upon me; through walks together, as well as reading and talk- ing, I was withdrawn from occupation with myself, and the greater duties which devolved upon a pupil with my advantages left me less time to think of myself. So I did a good deal for my in- tellectual culture, but nothing for my body, which — no wonder — did not develop as it should have done. I purposely refrained from everything which was not of intellectual value ; and if I was troubled by discomfort, for example, in the urinary organs, I always thought that my "illness" would make itself known in the course of time; and if this were not the case, I would later, after leaving this small provincial city, seek a cure in Vienna of a famous "professor." I sustained myself with this hope. I had lost 8o SADISM AND MASOCHISM all pleasure in life and kept myself alive merely for the sake of my unsuspecting parents and sisters (as I perhaps only made myself believe!). Music and literature constituted the only inter- ests of my life, and I was very much occupied with them in my leisure time. I carried out everything that I undertook with pain- ful thoroughness ; and still I would think that I had never worked carefully or thoroughly enough. I suffered a total lack of self- confidence in every direction. I had a very slight opinion of myself ; only in matters of feeling did I consider myself superior to my colleagues, and I was inwardly very proud of my great sentimentality. I was, it is true, respected by my fellows as a great student (no doubt despised by many a one), but yet decried as keeping aloof, because I could not endure the obscenities and sexual allusions in speech or the braggings of the others. I could not bear the great crowd with their coarse jokes or speech frequently connected with sex, so I withdrew more and more to "decent" "uncorrupted" friends, to whom I often poured out in a passionate manner from an overfull heart my thoughts and emotions. I had such great need of love and understanding. Differences arose easily between me and my most intimate friend, whom I reproached with indifference and disloyalty in friendship. Still I was never without ample relationship with those of like mind or similar in feeling. Yet I always considered myself phys- ically abnormal in comparison with my companions and tried to adjust myself to my lot, as well as I could. I dared not think of intercourse (sexual) with women, as like many associates of my age, I considered it something denied me and possible only to one who was "well," so little did I know of sexual things ! Important then for me was the removal of my parents to the large city of N. Here I came into a new environment, saw new things, was bewildered by the glitter and magnificence of the great city. The noise and the promenades made me so healthily tired that for a long time my imagined illness was forgotten ; at first, in- deed, I even believed myself cured. So much more violent and painful was the effect of the relapse as soon as I was familiar with life in N. Then began the same petty, harassing anxieties about my physical health which I had had two and three years before: irregular bowel movements, imperfect digestion, rush of blood to the head, and other nervous symptoms accompanying anaemia. All this brought me well-nigh to despair ; I again believed my life was in danger or would soon have an end. As I now laid my sufferings to my stomach, now blamed my digestion for CASE HISTORIES 8i them, and was besides anxiously concerned not to let the outside world discover them, I soon became a hypochondriac, was weary of life, cursed it, and suffered furthermore hideous tortures of remorse for my earlier "immoral" life, which was responsible for my misfortune. The physical ills faded to give place to the mental condition. I lived constantly in anxiety and fear that my sins would be discovered, and those were perhaps the most distressing moments of my life when (in the eighth form) the impending examination of all the students by the school physician was an- nounced. Yet this was rather superficial and did not extend, as I had feared, to the "heart and kidneys." My bodily condition, which manifested itself in bad posture, loss of flesh, and so on, corresponded with my unstable, despairing mental state. It was not so bad in the winter, and in the autumn, too, I was very com- fortable. I was able with energy to master even the psychic de- pression which sometimes threatened to overpower me ; but the summer brought me again completely beyond control. This was the worst time for me, while the spring, despite lonely walks, really did me good. Thus I suffered for two years even in N. without knowing what was actually the matter with me. My acquaintances and relatives considered me anaemic and believed that this explained everything, when inquisitive persons wanted to know why I looked so badly (for years my appearance had continued bad). In July, 1914, I passed my final examination with distinction. But every "outward" success pained me, it had thus no influence at all upon my health. And then came the most terrible thing of all : the World War broke out — 1914, in August. . . . There was little room in my thoughts for my personal well- being, when I first came to Vienna in 1914 (autumn), for it was necessary to find the means for subsistence for my family, who had fled with me before the Russians. I gave lessons and per- haps overexerted myself in so doing, yet I felt incredibly fresh and sound ; the ceaseless activity gave no time for somber moods. My family soon had to go to Bohemia to a small town permitted them by the state as a place to stay, and I remained alone in Vienna in order to pursue my studies (philosophy). Things went very well with me ; I was proud to be able to keep myself above water in Vienna through my own power ; my reports to my parents as to my condition were always very encouraging. I had in fact plenty to do to maintain myself and be able besides to carry on my studies to a slight extent. 82 SADISM AND MASOCHISM In the second year of the war, however, the absence of my family, the need for affection, for understanding, for companion- ship, came fully to consciousness ; I began to feel lonely, so fright- fully lonely amid the millions in Vienna, and unhappy ! No real intercourse ! At the university scarcely more than an acquaintance or two. I could unburden my overflowing heart to no one and yet yearned immeasurably for love and some one to understand and share ; unfortunately, it was very difficult for me because of my self -depreciation to make new acquaintances. I therefore re- mained alone. And again I felt continually unwell; in the morn- ing I would awaken unrefreshed (through sleep), but fearfully tired, wretched, and cast down; I had no energy and little or no ability for work. I gave my entire attention to absorption in myself and believed that I had discovered various diseases. I had excluded the sexual from my circle of thought for three years ; I had no thoughts of that sort; at the most I suffered some tor- tures of remorse for my past and reproached myself most bitterly that I was responsible for my unhappy condition. The self -accusa- tions increased and also my scorn of myself, to such a degree that I avoided looking at myself in the mirror. I washed and combed without a glass, thus neglected myself, and was for a long time the unhappiest mortal upon God's earth. Frequent depression in body and mind sapped my peace and energy. I was no longer in a condition to work uninterruptedly, so sorely was my life spirit crushed by the continual dejection. I regarded my life as utterly without purpose, useless, and odious ; but I had no right, as long as my parents were alive, arbitrarily to cast it away. So I had to endure further, "condemned to torment ever new." I worked in order to stupefy myself, to get out of myself, for I saw that activity was the best thing for me. But alas if I paused, or if I fell once more into my own hands ! I raged cruelly against myself at such times and had to flee anew from myself. Still, even a slight occasion, for example, the telling of a sexual ex- perience on the part of an acquaintance or friend, sufficed to stir me in my deepest depths and to make me feel for days ten times more severely my inadequate, "abnormal" condition. I had an un- conquerable horror and repugnance toward sexuality in every form ; I was fearfully disgusted at it. And besides I had not the most primitive actual enlightenment in sexual things, had always avoided instruction regarding it, whether orally (through col- leagues) or written (through books), and had carefully defended myself against it. My life was disturbed and disquieted essen- CASE HISTORIES 83 tially by the fact that I was not clear about my illness, its cause and form — I had first realized a few months before the truth that I suffered from "sexual neurasthenia," further that I had sexual desires concealed within me. Delightful evenings at concerts and theaters brought temporary excitement and distraction into my hunted life. Evenings with a home quartette, where I played the first violin, were able to divert me very much and raise my sunken confidence in myself, but this did not last long. And if it meant that I had to play before some one or if (in my studies) I had to speak in public before a number of people, I went through hours of fearful anxiety (that I would fail or physically collapse) ; tormenting feelings of tension and stage fright overtook me and made me their resistless prey. I could do nothing about it ; all my valiant struggle against it in no way improved the situation. In- stead of paying little attention to this sort of thing (as now Feuchtersleben has taught me), I gave too much consideration to these *'false sentiments" and states; I plunged myself into brooding over them, deeply and unconsciously, in morbid fashion, injurious as this might be. At times, however — it did happen, though sel- dom— something like an obscure life impulse protested in me, especially after some small success, for example, in my studies, against the morbid depression. I would resolve heroically to be **weH" through the energy of will, which would succeed for a certain time under favorable conditions. But then there would follow again periods when I was crushed and feeble, when my physical weakness bound even my will in chains. One time, in a particularly *'light moment," when I was afraid of a violent relapse, I concluded with trembling and hesitation to trust myself to a physician. Never has anything been so difficult for me as this going to the physician. I could neither eat nor sleep, could find no rest; all my thoughts revolved about the con- fessions that were before me, a hundredfold difficult to make. I was afraid also to be turned away by the doctor on account of my depravity. Yet, happily, my fears were not realized ; the human kindliness of the physician gave me courage, and I freed my so heavily laden soul in a torturing confession, but one that brought relief. I now learned for the first time that I was suffering a severe neurasthenia, but otherwise was "quite healthy," and the com- pletely astonishing thing that I would also cause all my nervous symptoms to disappear by later marriage. Thus far I had always assumed toward the female sex a position of awe and admiration, 84 SADISM AND MASOCHISM but never one of desire. I could not bear to have a girl look at me who might be sitting opposite (for instance, in the library) ; it always produced in me the most painful confusion. I would blush, become restless, fear my uneasiness might be noticed; I would believe I was being laughed at, mocked; I thought I was being observed by others and smiled at; and I became still more ill at ease, so that I tried to get out of the situation as quickly as possible. This was repeated almost every day ; I really suffered a sort of delusion of persecution. Finally, I could not visit the library without violent beating of the heart and anxiety; indeed, after a few minutes' vain attempt to work I had to leave it again (with face burning red). This, too, depressed me very much. I was just as constrained and uncertain in the presence of girls near whom I happened to sit during the lectures. I always considered that I must seem un- sympathetic, even repellent, for which reason I never even made any attempt to approach the young women who were my fellow students. If, however, chance brought us together, we got on well ; I was somewhat less embarrassed in going around with my ac- quaintances, often made a better impression upon them than I had thought. Thus my self-confidence was in a certain measure strengthened. And after the consultation I have mentioned with the physician, which put new life into me (I discovered that I was a human being like many other human beings), I diligently sought female society for harmless entertainment. I was often very awk- ward and confused, because the forced character of my action was a great obstacle. I was myself almost aware of the design in it, was disturbed. It was very difficult for me to struggle with my shyness, my irresolution. And I still live in conflict with these inhibiting factors in my life. I knew very well that I would have to become different; instead of a fearful, bashful, young man, always probing deeply and deliberating, a free, cheerful, light- hearted, active, and somewhat easy-going person. I would have to rid myself slowly of my habit of "melancholy." This did not happen. Everything was and is yet just as hard, even the things which others find easiest. The body will not obey the mind, which is always ready to overcome its reluctance and develop, but is withheld by physical resistance from higher flights. I often plunge myself into a situation for which courage would have failed me had I clearly deliberated, yet the too great consciousness of my action has then a paralyzing effect upon fur- ther development of the project and destroys for me the fr'its of CASE HISTORIES 8S what was at first a "success." Thus I often suffer from an excess of reflection and consciousness in things which are really matters of instinct and should be approached more impulsively. At the present I am suffering chiefly physical ills with a rela- tively quiet mental condition, as in the winter 1916-1917, when the whole time (October to May) there was hardly a day in which I did not feel myself extremely weary, without energy, and for the most part unable to work. This excessive predominating ''minus" in energy shortly before an oral examination, that is, under the. pressure of necessity, gives place to an astonishing *'plus," lasting but a short time, of energy and eagerness to work, which has seemed to me rather pathological. It was a contrast like that frequently produced in the head (brain) through anaemia and con- gestion. The "minus" then proved itself permanent ; I was usually very easily excited, always moody, could not stand being stared at, blushed at every slight occasion or at none at all, in the spring and summer could not quietly and without fear pass the benches^ in the parks filled with strange persons. Severe unexplained beat- ing of the heart disquieted me and often all night long permitted no sleep to visit my weary eyes. I would either not sleep at all, or I slept so soundly that I got up in the morning just as dead-tired as if I had not been asleep. And then I was fearfully timid, could not bear a stranger about me, only those whom I knew, with whom I could speak. I preferred being alone, but was unable in my sleepy state to study or to read. It had to be merely the newspaper or something humorous, light. So much the greater was my vexation, that I had to lose so much valuable time without making progress in my studies, or if not this, without doing something else useful. That distressed me very much ! The mortifying feeling, also of having remained behind the others in my development toward an independent, energetic man, at twenty years still so childishly bashful, afraid of the world and awkward in the situations of life (like going about with people and especially with the other sex), inexperienced and without energy; this has pressed very heavily upon me (at times!). If I thought of the future I was in despair, for although according to the doctor's verdict I was "quite sound" and need have no fear for my life, I still saw that under such difliculties and physical perplexities I would never make anything of it. The reading of Feuchtersleben's Diatetics of the Soul had a good effect upon me. My concentration upon intellectual work did not dimin- iah for six weeks and the newly revived flame of life burned clear. 86 SADISM AND MASOCHISM But gradually, perhaps I had driven too hard In one direction and overexerted myself, the symptoms of nervousness reappeared, dis- turbing me greatly. So I am still suffering from the fact that I can never count upon myself ; that means, I begin something one day with pleasure and delight, but the mood for it is gone the next morning or perhaps a little later. Therefore the frittering away in my work. Furthermore, I am afflicted with excessive shyness and embarrassment ; the physical states of weakness cause me on their part discomfort, absent-mindedness, want of resolution. I might force myself to continuous work (especially in the vaca- tion) and lose myself in it, satisfy myself by unwearied toil, if I were not tormented from time to time with doubts whether it would be healthful to live like that, that is, only among "dusty books'*; whether the "call of life" should not be heard by me, too, though I must confess once more that the longing for life is greater in me than my skill in finding my way into life. Periods for rest, that is, holidays, I cannot bear, although I am frequently in great need of thorough relaxation, and nothing but work wears me out. I am very fond of study, but it may be that this intensive, concentrated work, whereby the will is often forcibly put upon the one object and held there, is too much of an effort for me. I feel tired the whole day, but am not able, in spite of my weariness, to sleep in the afternoon. I notice the blood pulsating riotously and am compelled to wait for refreshment until the night's rest. Just when sleep would be most welcome, because I long for it in my exhaustion, is just the very time that it will not come. Thus I pass many sleepless nights and am naturally not then ready for work during the day. Very often what will not let me get to sleep is a palpitation of the heart not very strong but yet active, which is not unpleasant to me, although it appears inopportunely enough as a hindrance to sleep. The physical and psychical condition the day after are as variable as the sleep. At times I am very anaemic, feel very badly, apathetic and listless; at night again excited, the blood rushing wildly in my head, yet very eager for work. But I scarcely do a bit of work before the congested state of the cerebral blood vessels causes pains in the head, which last the entire day. And so I am always longing for a mean equilibrium between mind and body which would make it possible for me to bring my studies to an early conclusion and allow me to feel my life as something else than a burden and annoyance, rather as an opportunity to perform my part in the CASE HISTORIES 87 great sphere of work for the world and humanity, for the good of myself and of my fellow men. How little one learns in this life confession of the thoughts and desires which lie in the polyphony of thought in the lower registers. The analysis showed bondage to the sisters, strong homosexuality, and a repressed sadism, which was found to be derived from the original jealousy toward his sisters. The feeling of inferiority was only the result of his sadistic fan- tasies, which at first were directed against his family and later transferred to other objects. It was analysis which was able to prove behind the specific fantasies the relations to the family complex, which are never absent from any case. Patients often take to flight when this truth is approaching consciousness. The next case brings a beautiful example: Case Number 33. Mr. A. B., twenty-six years old, from healthy ancestry,, physically sound, suffers from masochistic fantasies which make him incapable of a real love. He would like to subject himself to the woman he loves, perform menial services for her, worship her as a goddess, kiss her hands, lick her feet. He was in love with his cousin when he was fourteen years old, whose hand he kissed. She seemed to him like an unearthly being. He be- lieves he had masochistic fantasies before this. The relation with the cousin still exists. He comes to her, throws himself down before her, kisses her feet. Yesterday he found her in bed. He threw himself upon her feet, which he kissed for half an hour. He began onanism when he was eighteen. Always the same fantasies with it. In this year he attempted coitus with a prosti- tute. He had the same feeling of reverence even toward this venal person. Potency and ejaculation stated as normal, although he always plays a passive part in coitus. He has had intercourse twenty to thirty times since then. He is unhappy because his mother wants him to marry and he feels incapable of marriage- He has never been in love. He cannot call the feeling for his cousin love. The cousin is a Circe. She is only "playing" with him. He believes that he wearies me. He has very thoroughly pic- tured the treatment to himself. I would, so to say, ''tickle every- 88 SADISM AND MASOCHISM thing out" of him.* He has never been understood. His father never understood him. **He is not my equal intellectually. My mother is everything to me. I spoke with her ten years ago even about my onanism, told her everything. Naturally I did not relate the masochistic fantasies. I have an exceedingly great need of love. I am as sentimental as I can be. I always think that I bore people. Except with my mother ; there I do not have this feeling." His cousin is an actress. She knows his weakness and plays the goddess. If he kisses her feet, he has an ejaculation. Disillusionment sets in immediately after ejaculation. He be- comes ill-humored, domineering, indifferent, and despises the woman whom he has previously worshiped so ardently! He is always lonely and lives in the past, his gaze directed backward. Last night he had a pollution dream. He was having inter- course with a woman. This means that he lay near a woman ; she touched him and at once it came. He never has dreams of an actual coitus, but always these touching dreams. He cannot re- member the face of the woman in the dream. He has not seen the face at all.^ "After such a pollution I am tired, suggestible, my head is foggy, I have pain in my neck ; even in waking from the pollution I am the next day worn-out, absent-minded, unable to work. It is a lost day." ® Why does he never dream of coitus, but always of playing, of kissing the hand? He hates society, from which he feels himself totally excluded. If he has been with a girl once, the second time he does not know what to say. He is shy, never utters question- able witticisms, treats every woman, even prostitutes, like women of high rank. He still believed in the stork at twelve and a half years! He thought at that time, when his sister was born, that the stork had flown through the window; and he told his comrades at school, who laughed at him. Was very angry when they did not believe his story. When he was enlightened by his fellows at the age of sixteen, he cried out : "I do not believe that of my parents !" Why does he observe himself so painfully? Always wondering what sort of an impression he is making upon other people, what they are thinking of him. He would like to be the center of every society ; everything should revolve about him ; he would like to shine, distinguish himself, be prominent. He would gladly be a salon lion. CASE HISTORIES 89 It is his pride that he was in Paris, where he succeeded in Hving chastely for a year. But he likes to tell his present associates of the dissolute life he led there, brags of the fictitious conquests which he never made. . . . He likes to go to the moving pictures. Wants to learn there how to conduct himself and impress women, how to win them. He wounds his vanity by frequently committing some childish stupid- ity and making a fool of himself at the office. He felt quite differ- ently in the army. He was officer, commandant of a company ; the uniform raised his consciousness of himself. Now he has sunk back to being a nonentity. He felt better in Paris. The pinnacle was the four weeks which his mother had spent with him in Paris ! His whole sojourn there had been only a single preparation for the mother's visit. He would always think : You will show that to Mother ! You will take your mother there ! Seven months passed awaiting his mother. Alas ! at home he does not treat his mother well. He is always in a state of irritation, screams at her, is the tyrant of the house- hold (protective measures against excessive tenderness). He has again had a pollution ! And what a "loathsome" dream went with it: I meet an ugly fat woman on the street. We go walking in the country. I seize her by her bosom ; she opens her legs ; I reach in and already feel the discharge. The woman impresses him, as he remembers her, as shapeless and bulky. A Parisian girl occurs to him, who was in love with him and roused him to go on excursions. It came merely to kissing. He never went further. He has too great respect for women. He has treated none but servants like the woman in the dream. He had at that time a number in the house with whom he played. But there was nothing else because a premature dis- charge took away his manhood. He says to me : "If I have spoken with a young man, I meant to say girl, I easily reach a fantasy with ejaculation." I call his attention to the sHp of the tongue. You want to say that I am homosexual ! I was often taken for a "cold brother." It frequently happens that I am accosted by men. . . . He has feminine features, a broad pelvis, a somewhat feminine nature. He affirms that he does not recall a homosexual impulse. SADISM AND MASOCHISM We may assume a strong feminine attitude. His great love to his mother has led to an identification with woman, which is manifest in his entire bearing. We may expect later disclosures which will show us that the old, hateful, shapeless woman of his dream is there to conceal other forms in the way of contrast. We guard ourselves from imparting anything of our suspicions to the patient under analysis, so that we shall not influence the course of the latter. The greatest resistances develop in the analysis. He sees al- ready that I am not going to be able to help him. He is a lost soul. Last night he had the most disgusting dream he has ever had in all his life. The analysis is at fault. "Tell me the dream !" "No ! I will not speak of it. You will think I am in love with my mother." *T have never yet spoken with you of your attitude toward your mother." "That makes no difference. I feel that you will speak." Finally, after long urging, he tells me the dream. I am lying in bed with my mother. I kiss her feet and she plays with my genital. I am lying with my head toward the feet. I go from the feet higher and higher and kiss the knees. I wanted to kiss still higher and woke with a pollution. He finally acknowledges that he has from time to time had similar dreams. I refer to the fact that he is always saying that the cousin "plays" with him. He considers this only a form of speech and does not mean anything. He stays away without any reason. I had been cautious and said nothing of bondage to the mother. But it forced itself upon him, and he took to flight when the knowledge came to him that the woman whose feet he wants to kiss is the mother. Those who are not analysts will find it hard to grasp how much these patients cling to their paraphilia. They have good reason to shun the analysis. The next patient, too, belongs in this category. He could not be induced to have treatment, because he had analytic knowl- edge. His latent sadism was doubtless the ground for his dread of the truth. It belongs to that form of masked sadism which has manifested itself as enthusiasm for the war. CASE HISTORIES 91 My Confession Case Number 34. I was born February 28, 1894, as the son of a higher official. I had two brothers within the course of three years. At five years old, I went to kindergarten and after at- tending it for a year, to the primary school. My nourishment since childhood has been simple, yet good and sufficient. I was violent- tempered and selfish, so that I was sometimes punished with a beating. My brothers, too, were often chastised this way, and if I looked on while they were being whipped a prickly feeling went through me, a sort of voluptuous pleasure, which I experienced more strongly if the blows fell upon an exposed portion of the body. I had the same or similar sensations if animals were beaten in my presence, or if I read or heard tales of cruelty; for example, of torture upon the rack. I still remember from the period of the elementary school that I once had great satisfaction in sticking a piece of wood into the anus, and I did this to my brother as we lay in bed. Another time I undressed in a concealed place, not so much to look at my sexual organs as to touch with pleasure the rectal region. Neither event was repeated. When I had finished my course at the elementary school with very good results, I entered college. A religiousness of a high grade developed during the fi.rst years of college, al- though no one enjoined this upon me. I fulfilled to the letter the requirements of my confession, absorbed myself in devotional exercises, and spent a great deal of time in church. I avoided at this time occupying myself in any way with sexual things, whether in speaking or in reading, and remained profoundly ignorant in this respect until far in the college period. The only enlighten- ment which I had was given me by a friend, who explained the act of coitus in very primitive fashion. I allowed myself to be persuaded in the fourth class (1908) to enter a society which existed among a number of students but which is strictly for- bidden by a disciplinary regulation of the intermediate school. This imitation of the student life of the college at first pleased me, but soon it disgusted me, and I now lived in continual fear of being discovered and made to answer for it. Various circum- stances compelled me to remain in spite of my aversion to the whole affair. Thus I lived four years in constant agitation. I was embittered and lonely. Association with the other members of this society influenced me no further, and I was little liked. I had had no sort of relation with girls during my entire in- 92 SADISM AND MASOCHISM termediate school period. I was very shy and constrained toward the female sex. Furthermore, I had no occasion to go or to speak with girls and stuck closely to the school, which does not like to see one going about with persons of the other sex. It happened only once that I was in love, if I may call it that, quite shyly and at a distance. This was in 1910 and of very brief duration. I studied diligently but had little physical activity. I also read a great deal. It was in the fifth class (1909-1910) that I bor- rowed a book one time from our school library and read it, Der Leutnant von Hasle by Heinrich Hansjakob. The hero of this story goes in the end to a monastery, where he performs devo- tional exercises and penances; such as, for one thing, striking himself with a small chain. This roused me and I did likewise with a leather strap. I repeated it and liked it more and more. These self-tortures soon became a source of gratification to me and I became ever more skillful in the invention of ways of tor- ture. Inasmuch as I persuaded myself that my perverted prac- tices were only "exercise of penance" and "hardening," I deceived myself as to the questionableness of this form of action and went on with it. I did not know at all how to explain it that in carry- ing out this self-abuse I was sexually excited (erection each time). I abused myself in every way possible. I beat myself with straps, cords, lashes, in which I had tied knots or woven thorns or needles. I treated my legs thus, my body, but especially the but- tocks and back. Since the noise caused by the blows might have been heard, I usually went at a late hour, when every one was asleep, to the closet, where I shut myself in and undressed in order to give myself up to my passion. I would look in the mirror after the act was performed and was glad if my back was full of bleeding spots. I still kept up the self-tortures while I lay in bed. I would lay sharp-edged pieces of wood under the buttocks, fasten my limbs with twine and the like, place a cord provided with short sticks of wood about the loins and draw it tight. I liked particularly to do this : I would draw a knotted cord or such a strap through between the legs and the anal opening and fasten it, pulled taut, before and behind to a cord which I wore about the waist. I did this sometimes even in the day. If I went to walk in the woods alone and unobserved, I found pleasure in sticking thorns or bits of wood obliquely into the anal aperture. I became more and more cunning in the carrying out of torments and the devising of new ones. Thus I remember once dragging stinging nettles between my legs. The impulse for doing these things came over me when CASE HISTORIES 93 I sat at my books in the evening and gave me no rest. Finally, I became unconsciously an onanist. When I lay in bed one night, it occurred to me to draw a strap supplied with knots sharply be- tween the legs. Repeating this I felt a pleasant tickling in the urethra. This sensation appeared when I stimulated myself with a rough piece of wood with my legs spread wide apart. I liked also when bathing in the brook to move the water rapidly between my extended legs. I did not yet know anything of onanism. My unhappy passion reached its highest point in mas- turbation, which I actually performed only a few times, after I had devoted about a year and a half (i 910- 191 2) to it. I gradu- ally came to recognize my errors, and this knowledge has been in- creasing up to this day. The following event gave it impetus : As we were led once from school to confession, the priest asked me in the confessional whether I had practiced self-gratification. I did not know what to say, for I did not understand the question. I began to consider and finally looked it up in an encyclopedia. I did this now frequently and so obtained extensive sexual enlighten- ment and became convinced, though not all at once, that I had practiced onanism. I ceased now from my sin and tried to live a pure life. I also consulted the encyclopedia more and more con- cerning sexual things. I withdrew myself thereby more or less from others, became reserved, and occupied myself very closely with my studies. But the results of my course soon showed themselves. I noticed now and then pain in the head and very often had erections, frequently on the slightest occasion, as, for in- stance, while lying on the sofa in the afternoon after eating. Hav- ing passed my final examinations with conspicuous success, I came in the autumn of 1912 to the university in Vienna. The evil re- sults multiplied. Continual erections appeared, even while walking on the street and especially when I went to bed at night. Pustules and exanthematic formations showed themselves upon my back. These appeared in my face, too. I had great fear of sexual diseases. I attributed my skin disorder to syphilis ; likewise, I was very much disquieted when I frequently felt a burning in urinating or even could not pass the urine. I therefore visited physicians, who reassured me. I often felt that the urinary aperture was moist. Then again I would discover that my bones were rubbing at their joints, which happened especially when I had been sit- ting for some time. I often felt pain in the lumbar region, then again disagreeable pressure upon the shoulders and back. A cer- tain feeling of dizziness occurred when I lay down and got up 94 SADISM AND MASOCHISM again, or if I stooped over; for about a minute everything was turning about me. I broke out easily in perspiration and became readily confused. I often suffered severe fits of depression and was then wholly in despair. I slept fairly well, despite all symp- toms, and was glad to sleep ; then I knew nothing of the world. I lived quite alone, avoided my fellow men as much as possible, and occupied myself eagerly with my studies. The first year in the university passed thus, and I again took up my studies in the autumn of 1913. I still feared I might be syphilitic and even more when, during the last months of 191 3, I discovered on my organ inflamed hair follicles. At the beginning of 1914, I consulted a dermatologist, who examined my skin but attributed no great sig- nificance to the various impurities on it. It is true I had said nothing to him of the cause. Severe and lasting constipation ap- peared at this time, which exists more or less even now. I often thought I had to empty the bowels and yet there would be no move- ment. I also recall that at that time a pollution occurred once every three weeks. Otherwise the nervous difficulties were less marked, which perhaps is due to the fact that I was living with a number of fellow students, taking athletics, and sleeping pretty well. I was still very shy toward members of the female sex. I fell in love at a distance with a girl in the beginning of 1914, but did not venture in any way to approach her. When I was at home for the Easter holidays in 1914, I became enamored of a young lady with whom I was personally acquainted. I had hopes of some return, but it did not come to anything serious, for I was too timid and my parents did not at all approve of her. I forced myself, therefore, to limit my intercourse with this girl and finally parted from her, a matter which I soon much regretted. The second year of college also passed in earnest study, and the vaca- tion following I used to bathe assiduously in the river, swim, and take sun baths. The war breaking out during these holidays, I ex- erted myself actively to become a soldier and found myself in the general levy in October ready for service in arms. But to my great sorrow, on presenting myself I was declared unfit. This hurt me very much and even to-day I have not yet completely reconciled myself to it. I returned to Vienna at the beginning of November to pursue my studies. I found myself again after this in a very depressed rnood. I stayed in my home town during the Christmas time. A local eruption, which itched violently, spread over the upper left side of my back, probably in consequence of being chilled when I CASE HISTORIES 95 had to spend the night in a hut during a mountain trip. Although this eruption caused me no further difficulty, it again led me to the fear of syphilis. My state of mind continued to be more and more dejected after the beginning of 191 5. The pollutions occurred more frequently, at an average of one, often two, a week. I lived in continual depression ; fear of insanity and other such things seized me. Often I slept badly or very deeply, but in the latter case was not refreshed. General fatigue and lassitude got hold of me, and I believed that I was at the end of my forces. Slight physical exertion caused nervous suffering, and study was no longer stimulating to me but became almost loathsome. The future seemed to hold no prospect for me in spite of my success hitherto, and finally the wish forced itself before me that my life might soon have an end. I frequently felt so hot that I thought I had fever, but then again cold chills would run over my back. A prickly feeling appeared in the upper part of my back as a con- stant disagreeable sensation. I further seemed often thoroughly used up, and my knees appeared to give way under me. The pollu- tions ceased perhaps the beginning of March, but frequent sexual excitement occurred. By the middle of March the condition I have described had reached its peak and it continued at this state for about five weeks. I thought I could explain these symptoms to myself as the effect perhaps of the inoculation I had had ; or it might be that I had caught cold at night, for even in the cold winter I always slept by an open window. My troubles were somewhat less by the end of April. I find even to-day a certain satisfaction in the thought that I shall be able to end my life in a useful manner sooner or later on the battlefield. I am still in love with that young lady with whom I quarreled in the long vacation. I became reconciled with her at Easter, 191 5. but, alas, I stand no more in intimate relation with her. When I contemplate my life, I have to see that I have sinned greatly, and although I would gladly consider marriage, yet I can- not guard myself from wondering whether, because of my con- dition, it would not be better not to marry, for I would pass on my illness to my descendants and thus only brmg harm to society. I now hope that at the next mustering of troops I shall be found fit for service and the period in the army mav in a certain manner bring me health. This man's evil conscience arises from his repressed sadism. He is very religious and needs this devoutness as a protection 96 SADISM AND MASOCHISM against himself. He loves only at a distance, since he fears the nearness of a woman. He might do something to her. We see here the syphilis as symbol of sadism. We will turn now to a case of ideational sadism, which will show us in a clear manner the origin of a sadistic fantasy. Here, too, we find the motive of the frivolous mother who gives herself to a number of men, so that hatred of the mother is transferred to all women. Case Number 35. Arthur T., thirty-two years old, complains of his inability for concentrated, purposeful work and of his impul- sive manner of action, and begs me to free him from this condi- tion. He cannot deliberate over anything and cannot await re- sult. Everything he does is done impulsively. From time to time he rouses himself to such impulsive actions as can be per- formed without reflection. Otherwise he is incapable of resolu- tion. He fritters away a good deal of his time, plays with his keys or with the dog, goes walking, waits for his meals, or dreams of great future successes that will make him boundlessly wealthy. He is of medium size, strong, shows no signs of degeneration of any sort, and comes from a healthy family. He is married for the second time and loves his wife exceedingly. Sex life normal, potency uncertain, sometimes ejaculatio prcrcox, often no desire for weeks, now and then great desire with little potency. His life history is very interesting. He came to America as a small boy with his parents. His father was a tailor, who soon found work and earned money. He was seven years old when he lost his father, whom he loved dearly, by an accident. The father was run over by an automobile. His mother found herself in great need. He remembers that there was not even a piece of dry bread in the house. So the little tot went to a policeman and complained of his troubles : "My mother is hungry ! Give us some bread !" Food was sent to the home by the police. Thus he early revealed his unusual energy. He did everything he could to earn money. He was a wild youngster, running about on the streets with all the little gamins, who mocked him on account of his Russian Yiddish. This skylarking became second nature to him. After he had earned his bread for some time as messenger boy, he became a boxer. As such he was for a long time invincible and greatly feared. Although he was really only of moderate strength, he was able through his <7/aw to force down all his opponents. He brought home money and had enough left to lead a reckless life CASE HISTORIES 97 He visited houses of ill repute and resorted to dens, which was to be fateful to him later on. He learned to know there all kinds of ruffians hiding from the light, housebreakers, thieves, murderers, with whom he made friends. He himself seemingly has never committed a crime. He finally gave up boxing to become a dealer in jewels. He proved so good that he himself became a well- known connoisseur of diamonds and was a valued force in this field. He made himself independent and earned a good deal of money, until an unfortunate marriage threw him out of his course. He married a Christian, which did not please his religious, bigoted mother. He soon discovered that his wife had deceived him. A child which she brought into the world during marriage proved to be a lover's child. He at last got a divorce and fell in love with his office clerk, a dainty blond woman. She was unhappily mar- ried, was divorced, and he was able soon to take her in marriage. But he has lost his luck since then. The diamond business went from bad to worse, so that at last he had to leave America and try his fortune in Europe. But he has no patience at all with his business and is always thinking of his homeland. He corrects his first statements in the next hours. He relates first why he had to leave America. His bad luck was the asso- ciation with the underworld ruffians whom he had learned to know in the saloons. He knew that some of his friends had committed a great diamond robbery. He had had no part in it. But the police trail led to him, and he was arrested. He was three months in custody without betraying his friends. He would have been able to obtain his freedom the first day, but he considered it his duty in honor to keep silence. He was at last set free. His present wife had meanwhile conducted his business very suc- cessfully, but soon a fresh misfortune threw him from his path. He had to give up the diamond business, for his name was dis- credited. He tried all sorts of things. He hired a restaurant but could not keep it and became finally proprietor of a cabaret, in which his early friends from the underworld assembled. One of these friends one day gave him valuable papers to keep. He passed these papers (national bonds) further; the next man wanted to invest with them and was arrested, because it was a case of stolen papers (the value amounted to 1,500,000 dollars!). This man stated that he had received them from Arthur T. The next day he was in all the newspapers as possessor, that is, as thief, of these papers. He was again under examination, and again he would 98 SADISM AND MASOCHISM not betray his friend. He was provisionally given his liberty. That proved dangerous for him. For his friend wanted to remove the person who knew his secret from this most beautiful of all worlds and had him waylaid by three masked men when he was going as usual about three in the morning home from the cabaret. Three revolvers confronted him at a dark street corner and the cry "Stop !" made him immediately come to a halt. He was taking a couple home with him in his automobile. While one man held the married couple at bay with a revolver, he had to get out and was dragged to a second automobile by the other two. He allowed himself to be pulled along but noticed that the automobile was padded inside. While one man was opening the door of the car, he tore himself loose and fired a shot from his loaded revolver at the highwayman. Both men hid behind their automobile, and now began a wild shooting. (Merely the thought flashed through him, What will your mother say when she learns of your death?) The noise brought several policemen, who began shooting on their part (a daily story in America). The three highwaymen quickly climbed into their car and rushed away. He was saved. He, too, departed before the policemen arrived, for he had many reasons for wishing to have nothing to do with the police. He now knew that his life was gone if he remained longer in the city. He still wanted to have his revenge before he left. He lay in wait for his famous friend, and with his revolver in his hand compelled the man to climb into his automobile. They rushed far from the city to the country. He gloated over the fear of death in his one-time friend, his present foe. But he no longer had the heart to shoot him down. He allowed him to escape and the next day left the city to go to Europe. He had his business sold. His name is now dishonored for all time. He can never again enter his old business. And he mourns for his mother, whom he loves above everything else and to whom he has brought so much sorrow. He tells me of a strange characteristic, from which he would gladly be free. If he learns to know any person or speaks with any one at all, he imagines that person in a position of suffering: dying, sorely wounded, maimed, groaning, lamenting, or uttering his last sigh. He gloats then in thought over the tortures of this person. It makes no difference whether it concerns a friend, enemy, or an indifferent person. The obsession always arises. He does not CASE HISTORIES 99 know when it began but thinks that it has become stronger in the last years since the unfortunate experiences. He recollects no occurrence which gave rise to this attitude. Nor did he see his father, who met with the accident, when he was dying. Another remarkable peculiarity has as a result that he hates women after he has been having intercourse with them. He could choke them and is glad to run away. He has never perceived this hatred toward his wife. But she, too, inspires him with feelings of aversion in the morning after waking. He can never have coitus with a woman in the morning. He feels then only a bound- less disgust, which he rationalizes by saying that women have a bad breath in the morning. He has never had intercourse with a woman more than once in the night. Hatred, loathing, and even the impulse to run away make themselves felt immediately after coitus. The mother is really the only woman whom he loves deeply and well. Nevertheless, it is impossible for him to be kind to her. From a distance he writes her the most affectionate letters, but when with her he is gruff and always has something with which to find fault, although he knows that his mother idolizes him. He was formerly very jealous of his brother, who is an idler and a ne'er- do-well, because he believed that the mother favored him. He has discovered in later years that he himself is the sole ruler in her heart. His brother married and then very seldom came to see her, with which to-day he bitterly reproaches the brother. His stepfather — his mother has married a second time — does not come into consideration. He is for the mother only the man who earns the money. He was frightfully jealous when his mother married again. He listened sleepless on the wedding night and was much excited as he heard various suspicious noises. Some months later he was so excited eavesdropping at a coitus that he rushed furiously into the room and cried to the mother : *Tt is a shame that at your age you must still do this." His mother must have answered him in her excitement : "What have you to say then, you lousy fellow ! Come on and show that you are a man." He has often had to think of these words, but does not believe that they roused him sexually and that he took his mother's invitation seriously. (He was thirteen years old at the time !) He knows that it was out of love to her that he gave up boxing. She was opposed to this profession and said it was not proper SADISM AND MASOCHISM for a Jew. Nevertheless, he always received her blessing when he had to fight. She was always warning him and putting diffi- culties in his way. He resolved once to fight without her blessing. He had been unconquerable until that evening. But this time he suffered his first defeat and through an opponent whom he had already knocked out five times. Without her blessing he was weak and defenseless. After this disaster he gave up boxing. He sacrificed it to his mother. He has repeated dreams in which he is exchanging shots with an opponent. Last night's dream reads: I am in a room in which many rats are running around. I shoot at the rats and kill some. Then out of the depths a hand is stretched. I shoot at the hand. Asked about homosexual experiences, he admits that he per- formed mutual masturbation with his younger brother. Coitus inter femora had also occurred. He remembers no other homo- sexual events nor any other paraphilia. I interpret the rats as evil thoughts which pursue him. Then he brings me the following confession. He was thirteen years old when his stepfather brought to the house his two daughters from his first marriage. There was little room in their home, so that he had to sleep in the same bed with his seventeen-year-old stepsister and his brother. It came to regular coitus with the step- sister. (He believes that he performed the coitus always in an im- possible position. The sister lay behind him. He evidently con- denses in one scene experiences with the brother and the sister.) The sister became pregnant and bore a child. The child was brought into the world in a small neighboring city. There lived a doctor who wanted to adopt a child. The child was laid before his door and the result was as desired. The child was a welcome gift to the doctor ; he received it as his own. One would suppose that such a bitter experience would have taught him and his parents a lesson. But he again slept with the sister in one bed, and she became for the second time a mother through him. The second child was given over to a foundling home ; it was a girl. He often dreams of becoming a rich man and then seeking both children, revealing himself to them as their father, and adopting them. CASE HISTORIES lOI He has a remarkable peculiarity. If he sees a girl, for example in a street car, who seems to be kindly disposed toward him, he does not address her. But her image follows him for days. Then he visits all the places where perhaps he might see her. He is always thinking what he may have lost in her (he seeks a lost ideal). He has a strong craving for affection. He fell in love with a little girl when he was twelve years old. Even to-day he is easily inflamed again. It is always Christian girls that he loves. His first wife was a Christian, and in the absence of his wife he again fell in love with one of this faith. He tortured her unspeakably, and it gratified him to make her cry. Girls whom he loves must not be Catholics. He hates Catholics and loves Protestants. This seems so much stranger because he owes the greatest kindness done him to an Irish (Catholic) family. We know that he was seven years old when his family was starving. Their neighbors were a Catholic family, father, mother, and daughter, and a lover, usually drunk (besides they all drank). The little fellow was always being sent for brandy and was richly rewarded. He was also fed. It is true he saw there scenes which he should not have witnessed. Sometimes he observed the lover having intercourse with the girl while sitting there. . . . His attitude toward this family was bipolar. He envied them and hated them with the full hatred of the poor and the recipient of gifts. . . . He admits homosexual fantasies. He often imagines that he is sucking out a man's penis. He has had active relations only with his younger brother. He has indignantly rejected various homo- sexual overtures. Some more misdeeds occur to him in regard to the "rats." The first time that he was in jail there was among the prisoners a policeman who had illtreated his wife during her confinement. One day the other prisoners fell upon the man and mistreated him. The man lay helpless on the floor. The picture of the tortured man, upon whom he, too, had dealt hearty blows, pursues him in his fantasies. He does not remember whether he had sadistic fantasies before this scene. He is always restless and impatient. He must have everything at once. If he orders food at a restaurant he cannot wait until it is brought. His wife calls him a "one-tracked" man. He can never embark upon two things at once. He must wait until the first enterprise is finished. SADISM AND MASOCHISM His mother plays a large part in his fantasies. To make her rich seems to be his secret goal. He presents a large number of actual facts which hinder the smooth course of the analysis. He seeks every possible escape. He has to go away on business, has important concerns to attend to, until at last he is confronted with two alternatives, either to permit himself to be analyzed or to pursue the way of his fan- tasies. He decides upon the analysis and now definitely remains in Vienna. His wife has left him. She came to see that she did not love him. He bore the heavy blow with a fair degree of calmness. Her conduct before her departure made it easier to give her up. She humiliated him and talked in an ugly fashion, saying among other things, "You are a contemptible puppy." He cannot forgive that. This explains to us the following dream : I have strangled a woman. She screams loudly. I believe it was my wife. He admits that he has repeatedly indulged in similar fantasies. He thinks also when with persons whom he loves, for example, with his mother: *'What sort of face would she make if I should suddenly seize her by the throat?" Other thoughts pursue him: "What would Mr. N. say if I should all at once strike him in the face with my fist? What sort of a face would he make then?" — The sufferings of others interest him, and he imagines every person in some distressing situation or other. Another dream has a certain significance : I was going up a steep stairs. Suddenly the stairs ceased and I had no ground under my feet. I was about to fall into an abyss and awoke with fear. He brings a long story as an association. He deceived a man who owed him money, in order to get back the money. He told him a fabulous tale, that he was going to Europe to sell the stolen papers (bonds), and created a Mr. X., who does not exist. Now he receives daily telegrams from his victim and fears trouble. He is afraid of being arrested and of losing the ground under his feet. It is interesting that the choking fantasies manifest themselves by the law of talion in all sorts of respiratory difficulties. He fre- quently has choking sensations in his throat, his collar is too tight, he has to clear his throat, and he fights for air. Slight symptoms CASE HISTORIES of asthma at times show something of the power of his bad con- science. He dreamed : I have to pass through a frightful struggle with a man. I waken bathed in perspiration. He is in conflict all the time with his criminal impulses. He has fantasies that he sees his mother dying and suffering. At the same time he longs for his mother and regrets that he has given her so little money, while he has scattered it with full hands for his wife. He cannot understand why he has always so tormented his mother although she has never reproached him. He often came home drunk from the saloon ; he reviled her in vulgar man- ner and found fault with her upon every occasion. Twice he married a Christian in order to punish her. He was jealous of his stepfather and of his brother. Now the knowledge slowly dawns upon him that his jealousy drove him into both his unhappy mar- riages. He recalls the love scenes between stepfather and mother and understands why he has such an interest in hearing sounds in an adjoining hotel room which are uttered in the love act. He is repeating the impressions which were made upon him when a child (sexuality of the adjoining room). His conduct with women is remarkable. He sees some girl. He is charmed. He runs after her. He often discusses a ren- dezvous. But he never keeps it. He is happy at the last moment not to have his desire fulfilled. He has to overcome an inex- plicable feeling of fear. Several motives for such behavior ap- pear in the analysis. He is always seeking the mother and sister ; he seeks a man — and he is afraid of his own sadistic impulses. He saw his wife in the dream. She told him that she had mar- ried again. He was terribly excited and awakened with violent beating of the heart. The associations of the dream lead to his mother and to her second marriage. He relates a number of episodes that bear witness to his frightful jealousy. One time he came home. It was before his mother's marriage. He found the door of one room locked. The future stepfather was in the room with the mother. He was at once suspicious that they had been doing "something forbidden," and later he carefully inspected the bed in every fold and every spot to see if there was any proof of coitus. SADISM AND MASOCHISM Every morning he would observe his mother critically to know whether she had a "hot night" behind her. He hated her at these moments and could have killed her. We now understand his hatred of woman. It is a result of a torturing, unavowed jealousy. All women remind him of his mother. Therefore he could kill every one of them after coitus. He imagines in fantasy dur- ing his act of intercourse his mother in coitus with the stepfather. His behavior to his mother also becomes intelligible. He loves her warmly. Indeed, he admits that she is the only woman whom he actually loves, and he hates her because she married the step- father and betrayed him so painfully. He hates his stepfather fiercely. He used to lie in his mother's bed before her second marriage. He dimly remembers all sorts of love scenes. A man came to their house after the death of his father who was poor and cared more for drink than was good for him. He rocked the younger brother and performed many services, received for this food and sometimes lodging. The pa- tient saw in him a lover of his mother and hated him, as well as the brother, who was an unwelcome rival because later he might also lie in the mother's bed. In his thoughts he always lives with his mother. Suffering always from premature ejaculation, he has devised a means of diverting himself. He thinks during coitus either of his mother or his sister. His sister has a very dark complexion. He chooses only dark girls. His wife was the only blonde with whom he could cohabit (differentiation). We know that never in his life has he been able to perform coitus twice in one night. The impulse toward strangers sufficed only for a short time, and then he turned away from them and back to his infantile ideals. He struggles with thoughts of suicide. He sees no way out from his present situation. He is hurt that he has lost his wife, and he has to confess that he himself is at fault. He began to neglect her immediately after the wedding and look around for other women. He had an affair with another girl and sent his wife to Europe so that he would not be disturbed. They were together one night before her departure. While before that she had been anaesthetic, so that he believed he had reason to desire other women, she yielded herself, despite previous scenes, with such ardor that he cannot forget that night. He does CASE HISTORIES 105 not know whether she wanted to show him what he had lost in her or whether it was feminine artifice to bind him forever to her. He dreamed last night : I was in a barber's shop and was being shaved. I was talking all sorts of nonsense with the barber. Thereupon he cut me in the lip with the razor, so that I felt my teeth through the hole. It was as if he had cut in me a woman's vagina. He first denied he had done it, but finally admitted it. The dream plainly reveals a homosexual attitude. He is no longer a man ; he is a woman and can use his mouth as a vagina. He denies everything when questioned concerning fellatio fan- tasies. He acknowledges having played with his brother. The brother took his organ in his hand, while he played with the brother's member. He does not recall fellatio. Suddenly there occurs to him a young imbecile. They used to pay him a few pennies for fellatio, which he knew how to perform very skillfully. The experience with the defective was allegedly forgotten. He cannot remember fellatio with the younger brother. He has always said of the brother that he was indifferent toward him, he despised him, or he hated him because he neglected their mother. To-day he confesses that he loves the brother very much and often longs for him. The brother married at twenty years, shortly after his own first marriage, merely to imitate him. But he is now in a bad relationship to his mother, because the daughter- in-law and mother-in-law cannot tolerate each other. He would gladly have his brother come to Vienna, if he were unmarried. . . . He dreamed : I was creeping out of a house in Ch. through the cellar. I went up and down to the coal hole. The door behind me was closed, so that I was caught. I was afraid of N. He will find me and kill me. I thought : "He can come in only through that coal grating. If he sees me, he will surely discharge his revolver and perhaps hit me." I was certain to starve or to be suffocated, and I lay down to sleep expecting to die thus from exhaustion or by a murderous hand. This dream reveals a serious situation. He cannot return to America, where his mother lives. His enemy N. would try to put him out of harm's way. On the other hand, we see an evi- dent uterine fantasy, which he confirms for me. His daydreams are reversions to embryonic life. N. stands also for his father. He often thinks of his stepfather and becomes greatly excited. He is always excited, always immersed in his dream world. io6 SADISM AND MASOCHISM He has the desire in the theater or restaurant suddenly to cry out and create a scandal. He wants to draw attention to himself. He informs me of the remarkable fact that he has been able arti- ficially to produce attacks of rage by pumping up his affect. He has simulated all sorts of diseases to make his mother attentive to him. He would suddenly produce fainting fits or epileptic at- tacks, asthma, and similar conditions, so that he could then have all kinds of wishes granted. He was shown such excessive tender- ness by his mother in his early childhood that he can never forget that happy time. . . . He again has a dream : I am in Dr. Stekel's consultation room and am being analyzed. I am lying in a bed. Dr. Stekel afterward lies down in the bed and dies. I go into the outer room, where a number of patients are waiting. I want to prepare them first slowly and say : **The doctor is busy. The gentlemen will have to wait." Only after a while do I inform them of the fact of his death. He has me die. In a second dream his uncle dies, the head of the firm with which he is working at present. Nothing holds him longer in Vienna. He can go at once to America, see his wife and visit his mother. He wants himself to be an analyst. He will treat the patients after my death. But the most important determinant is revealed when he comes to speak of his necrophilia. He had as a child the fantasy of using dead bodies for sexual purposes, especially fantasies of lying with his mother at the moment of her death. As a reaction to these wishes, he now suffers from fear of death. He cannot go to a cemetery. It seems impossible even to attend a funeral. His thought sadism is connected with his necrophiliac tendencies. He manifests his primitive reaction toward all persons. He can most easily satisfy it upon the dead body, for he always acts ac- cording to the law of least resistance. It happened that in his second marriage he performed no coitus for two months. He explains this as follows ! I came home and the first thing was that my wife said : "I have a fearful pain in the loins." I saw in this a resistance to coitus. (The man had a correct intuition. For his wife, who was first analyzed by me, admitted to me that she used the pain in the loins to defend herself against coitus, in which she usually remained anaesthetic.) At this moment my desire was all gone. I felt something like hatred arising, suppressed the feeling, and went to sleep. For this reason I often have great satisfaction CASE HISTORIES with a prostitute. I know that she will offer no resistance. For I am afraid of myself. I might become violent and I do not know what I might do to my wife at such a moment. He corrects a false statement, which explains his hatred toward men. His father was not the victim of an accident. He had sud- denly deserted the mother. The marriage was unhappy. They were always quarreling and the father reproached the mother with unfaithfulness and frivolity. He disappeared one day and never came back. The mother had evidence sent her from a Russian rabbi that her husband had died in Russia, whither he had re- turned. Thereupon she could marry again. The father must be living and have married a second time. He hates the father thoroughly, although he preserves kindly memories of him from the first seven years. He sees in him the cause of all his misfor- tune. He transfers the hatred from the father upon all older men. He acknowledges fantasies in which he goes to Russia to shoot him. Other fantasies are concerned with the stepsister, with whom he has begotten two children. She is now married. He dreams that her husband dies ; she comes to him and keeps house for him. Naturally, they then resume the old relationship. They search for the children. Since in the fantasies he is very wealthy, he can offer the children a new life and declare himself as their father. The third group of fantasies occupy themselves with his mother. The mother must leave the stepfather and live with him. He always chooses among prostitutes the mother imagoes. He tells of a prostitute with whom he found the greatest satisfaction in his life. He describes her in detail. He can never forget her. The description corresponds accurately to the smallest feature with that given of his mother. He realizes himself that the prostitute was a mother imago and admits that he has often masturbated with the fantasy that he was lying with the mother. Incest dreams with pollutions came regularly every two months. In his daydreams he is with his mother and makes right every wrong he has done her. For she was always kind and good to him, although he tor- mented her cruelly after her second marriage. But then ne becomes conscious of his hatred toward his mother. Why had she married ? Why had she deceived his father ? Why did she have an affair with the man he mentioned ? Women were always false and bad. None of them could be trusted. io8 SADISM AND MASOCHISM The Irish girl of whom he has told was also unfaithful. He saw other men go to her. He himself loved this girl and at the time formed the hypothesis that all Catholics are false. His thought sadism has its sources in a variety of com- plexes. He hates in men the stepfather and his actual father. But he also hates the man who deceived him with his first wife. These persons thrust themselves behind the visible masculine objects. With women, the hatred is directed principally toward the mother. The sister, too, is a traitress because she did not wait for him, but married. The Irish girl and the first wife likewise come into question as hate objects. It is interesting now that in the course of the analytic solu- tion he has completely lost his ideational sadism. He no longer imagines any one suffering. As confirmation of his recovery, an unexpected improvement in his potency appeared. The man stopped pushing infantile ideals underneath real ones and be- hold— he developed such an extraordinary potency that he could protract coitus to an hour and more. The sadism in this case can plainly be referred to his jealousy and to a definite constellation. The irresolution and the day- dreams have entirely disappeared. He has recovered his for- mer energy. He could easily surmount the separation from his second wife because his successes with other women distinctly raised his feeling of self. He intends never again to marry a Chris- tian. He thinks they have no heart for a Jew and despise him in the depth of their soul. I do not know whether this would fit all cases. This tend- ency came clearly to light in the analysis of the second wife, on which account I sanctioned her resolve to be separated from her husband. They carry on a friendly correspondence since the separation. He is somewhat resentful, it is true, but he realizes that he has been guilty of serious faults, and he is trying to under- stand his wife. He is putting nothing in the way of the final divorce, and both are happy to have secured their freedom. Every parapathic suffers from a psychic scotoma. It is pre- CASE HISTORIES 109 cisely sadism which conceals itself most completely and which always escapes a self-analysis. There are intellectual persons who analyze themselves for months, and it is the sadism they overlook. Any one who has read attentively the preceding volumes of this work will remember how frequently parapathic disturb- ances are precipitated by sadistic impulses. Numerous sadists are found especially among impotent men ; they have fled from their impulses into weakness. It is interesting to study in an example how deeply these sadistic impulses are hidden, so that even the trained analytic eye is not able to discover them. I have repeatedly had to analyze again patients who have been analyzed, but who left the analysis uncured and then came to me because they hoped that something else might still be found which my predecessors had overlooked. And usually I was able to establish a criminal- sadistic complex. One has this experience also with analysts. Therefore they are blind for these facts (analytic scotoma). The next case offers a beautiful example, which I will give only in brief form, and even so only the beginning, which leads as far as the discovery of the sadistic complex. The case is very interesting, also, inasmuch as the combination of zoan- thropy and sadism is very frequent (cf. the chapter **Zoan- thropy," Infantile Sexuality) . Furthermore, the bit of analysis furnishes a wealth of interesting and noteworthy detail. Case Number 36. It treats of a marine officer, twenty-four years old, essentially healthy, who entered into an affair with the wife of a comrade, in which he had never been able to succeed. He suffered premature ejaculation. Actuated by a desire to help himself, he procured my book on impotence and studied it. The loneliness of his life in port during the war woke his interest in analysis. He studied all my books, analyzed himself often for hours of the day, and brought much material to light. But the disorder did not improve. He decided after the war to study medicine and become an analyst. He first sent me a report of his life so that I might begin his analysis. My Dear Doctor: What I know of my sexual life from my earliest childhood is as follows: no SADISM AND MASOCHISM Sexual things interested me greatly at an early period. I medi- tated upon the origin of a human being when only eight years old and had the notion that every girl slowly formed a child in her body. I thought that each one of my female schoolmates already carried around with her a tiny foot in her abdomen and the child was growing further in her. (I am the son of a high official whose post was in the country and so there was from childhood a dis- tinction in me between us children and those of the poor people. If the latter talked of sexual things at school, they would not let me hear, remarking: **You may not know that." Only, one or another would tell me something now and then.) Before I came to Vienna at ten years old I knew nothing of intercourse and its consequences, but that little children come from the female sex I was somehow aware; from what source my knowledge came I do not know. The sight of an idiot who had fallen from a chair taught me that women "underneath" are different from men. I remember yet to-day that this occurred directly after the first school confession. I was very religious up to my eleventh year. Perhaps after seeing the repulsive hairy spot, following upon the confession, I reproached myself, for this is still so plainly in my memory at the present time. After this sight I crept under our servant girl's chair in order to see the ''hairy object." At one time I imagined she, too, had a ''bone" like the men. I was therefore not quite clear about it. I tried by all kinds of ques- tions to get the maids to tell me how we were different ; they said, only through the dress. I liked to talk with my comrades who went the same way to school with me of the member, urine, and stool ; I told them marvelous stories from books I had at home regarding the origin of the urine and feces in the scrotum, boasted frightfully, and took delight in the play of my fantasy. I liked to play ''animal" with my brother and a friend, in which we — at least I — would let the member stand out (that was as a boy of seven to eight years). When I urinated, the friend would behave wildly, racing about and emitting animal sounds. Once my brother and I in the bath "milked" each other's scrotum. Apropos, I was very fond of playing "animal" until the thirteenth or fourteenth year. Best of all "birds." Other wild animals throughout my earlier years, to the distress of my grandmother, who was always telling me that the people would consider me crazy because of my stupid behavior and noise. Later I often played animals by myself, especially when I practiced onanism. I would imagine to myself in bed (thirteen to fourteen years) that now I was an CASE HISTORIES III animal ; I would creep around the bed for some time on all fours, the organ would stiffen, and the hand would do the rest. Once when a boy of six or seven, we wanted to pierce a May beetle with a needle, and my member became stiff. I liked to play stabbing in general — we had chickens but were not allowed to look on when the fowls were killed — I cut a chicken out of paper and then played stabbing it. These would be memories from the period before ten, when I was in the country. One thing more : Secret feeling of pleasure in touching the sexual parts of a cow. Yes, and once I made a girl from school come with me behind some bushes and show me her sexual parts and had the idea of putting a leaf into the opening. Then we came to Vienna. Meyer's Lexikon and my new associates soon initiated me into everything. My greatest desire was to perform coitus. I soon fell in love with a girl who lived near, but who was displeased with me when she heard elsewhere that I talked of ''filthy things." I tried to persuade another girl. But I talked much too much and hesitated to come boldly out with what I wanted to do. I was less embar- rassed once before an older woman. She, however, ridiculed me or mocked me. I had more confidence toward our servant. She was very devout. Nevertheless, she was willing to let me — the eleven-year-old — uncover her beautiful breasts — I still recall it now with pleasure. I lifted her skirt and was able to get a glimpse, despite her struggle and relative strength, of the mons Veneris. I took out the excited member but did not get it in, because the girl was sitting and remained in this position. She would not permit coitus, although I begged for it. I often threw her to the floor, but never succeeded. At that time — I was not yet acquainted with onanism — I tried to make copulatory movements between the cover and the seat in the closet, hollowed out an apple and tried with it. Both without result. My neighbor in school had his hand in my pocket, and this naturally had a hole in it. He manipulated my organ, and if the professor — I was in the gymnasium even at ten — had not stood up just then, the gratification would have occurred for the first time ; I already had an intimation of it. Unfortunately, the hand had to come out of the pocket. In Vienna I once played "laying eggs" with my brother. We both had erected organs. One copulated with the other by anus, sprang out of bed, and laid eggs in every possible place in the room. Then we went back to bed so that we might copulate again. Then the ''female" got up ae^ain and laid eggs. When she had laid, she went back to bed 112 SADISM AND MASOCHISM and the "male" covered her again (only by indication). We kep changing the roles of male and female. I came again when I was twelve from Vienna to the country. Our new maids were very much embarrassed at my smartness, and I became more and more shy and *'better-behaved." But coitus still remained my ardently desired ideal. I then entered the gymnasium at H. There we were under the tyranny of the priests. One might not speak to a girl ; I knew no one. I learned at H. at the age of thirteen the art of onanism, which I very diligently practiced. Often with a second person. In school, in the theater, at home, yes, even once in a church. When I was about fourteen, I was taught by comrades the injuriousness of the practice, and I began to fight against it. Every day I would say to myself : "To-day will be the last time." I also had the childish fear that the "sap" must be all there at one time and later in marriage I would have only half of it or even nothing in the "eggs." And when once I was indulging in onanism for the second time in the day and only a little fluid came out, I thought, "Now I actually have no more." But a friend — Hkewise a confirmed onanist — consoled me : the thing was always being replenished by the blood. Now I practiced onanism at intervals of a few days, but each time I resolved to be chaste. I envied many a student of the first class his innocence ! One of them, in- deed, made upon me such an impression of his angel purity that I — of the fifth form — often went walking with him, although I naturally had a quite different mental horizon from his. As a counterpoise to my passion, I frequently became quite religious. That is, at the end of the second class I was already an "unbe- liever." To be sure, more outwardly than within, as I now first noticed, for in later more mature years I doubted much, though emotionally I would always rather have believed than disbelieved. I can never at all, for example, believe in the doctrines of the Catholic Church, if I consider the matter intellectually. And yet a slight experience recently taught me that the fear of God still dwells within me. It was said that some one had died, and the question was asked, "How was that?" I said in a stupid joke: "Because he did not manage right." At the moment the thought flashed through my head : "You will be dead at once as a punish- ment for these wicked words." But back to our theme. I imagined in onanism desirable girls, even once my mother's sister and once Mother herself. I was becoming less and less bold about setting forth upon actual love, although my fantasies elaborated the most daring plans in this respect. In the upper gymnasium I went about CASE HISTORIES with girls and had three more or less unfortunate love affairs, but never thought of sexual intercourse, although when walking arm in arm and in kissing there would be erections. I believed that the girls were so respectable that one did not induce them to have it. Then one day I discovered a better technic for onanism ; namely, through imitation of natural coitus. Every gymnasium student possesses a large Latin and a large Greek lexicon. Put a piece of sackcloth between, and one has a vagina of the strongest mus- cular power. Would you believe that never in any natural act which I have ever yet performed have I had such tremendous feelings of pleasure as in this "book onanism" ? Can you explain this to me ? Perhaps because the women whom I there represent to myself are exceedingly more beautiful than any real women and because I am disillusioned by the reality, as has been the case in the brothel. I have not been in the brothel now for a long time and have resolved — it is very easy for me to do — never to visit one again. As to the frequency, I can say that it often happened that for a period of several days I would perform onanism once a day. It v/as very seldom twice a day. Often, on the other hand, I could hold out for fourteen days. Not longer, although I always believed that I had now conquered my **vice" for all time. In the eighth class, a comrade called my attention to a new procedure which ought to keep a golden mean ; that is, in principle to indulge in onanism only every eight days. Besides, one gave one's word of honor to a friend to hold to it, but to confess the opposite with a remorseful heart. I lived one month according to this, but as I broke the promise once more, I was too much vexed to bind my- self again. For onanism, I liked best to undress myself so that I was quite naked ; otherwise, too, I liked to undress, which I frequently do still to-day. I have had to perform onanism in the holidays because my parents cut off every intercourse with girls. I was instructed in the last years at the gymnasium as to the consequences of sexual diseases and therefore for a long time avoided going to a brothel. At the end of the eighth form, we were "scientifically" enlightened regarding everything in a lecture by our school physician. His discussion culminated in the assertion, "Continence has never harmed any one." Besides, I was almost ill at his graphic portrayal of syphilis ; after the lecture I was pale and yellow. But this kept me, when I was finally free from home, a long time from visiting a brothel. I suddenly stopped practicing onanism as much as formerly, 114 SADISM AND MASOCHISM when I reached the course for marine candidates and was among many comrades. I believed that I had overcome the onanism. But now when I have my own cabin, I see the reason. I was but Httle alone and unobserved. For when I came into possession of the cabin, masturbation again started. I do not defend myself against it, since I have come to know your conception of it. I am perhaps seized with regret afterward, when I think that by it I may be lessening the feeling of pleasure for the real sexual act. Now at last to the natural thing. Once in Pola when I was nineteen, I plucked up courage to perform the sexual act with a condom. I needed a very long time with the first attempt and had much less satisfaction than with the books (that occurred to me during the act!). The next time it came very quickly, but the pleasure was not so great as with the books. The bodies of the prostitutes greatly disappointed me. I recall only two that pleased me, and with whom after a short time I quickly performed the act again. After some time I no longer used a preventive, but prophy- laxis. Slowly I became aware of the weakness of the satisfaction, also that I did not want to cohabit with the woman the second time. Once one of them reproached me : **You are impotent !" I was afraid now of that. But when I returned to Vienna the next time, I was able with a prostitute who was somewhat finer to per- form coitus five times in one hour. That comforted me again. I have already described fully in my last letter my most recent ex- periences— with the woman that I love I am almost impotent! I inclose a dream, which has excited me very much. It seems to me that I am about to run aground with my ship or with one in which I previously embarked in the harbor of Pola. Half asleep I look out of my cabin porthole and gradually notice that we are not yet moving. I was already fully awake, and under the influence of the dream my heart was beating violently. I have learned from you to see much behind simple dreams, but what could so simple a seaman's dream signify? This life story contains some very instructive facts. We come here upon the playing of animals. That sort of thing is frequently found in the dreams of youthful sadists. The im- paling of May bugs produces an erection. The killing of chickens is practiced with paper models. The religious complex is developed early as an obstacle to the sadistic impulses. It is to be assumed that it still exists. CASE HISTORIES I have met a few times with the lexicon onanism. I knew a young boy who used the pigskin-covered Bible for this purpose. Reading in the lexicon appears to have been the first stimula- tion to fantasy. We will return to the lexicon complex. The dream shows his inner religiousness and fear of the sadistic impulses. His life ship is threatened with accident. He consoles himself that he is not going; that is, he has no actual relationship. Now he comes to Vienna. He wants to study medicine and learn analysis. He wants to be analyzed. He promises me to bring a true report of every sitting. This experiment, made by me repeatedly (only with physicians and medical students), came to grief in a short time. The writing down of the material usually breaks off when the sadistic complex is coming into consciousness. The first session is a repetition of what he has already writ- ten. I merely indicate it here, but bring some additional re- marks. First sitting. Sexual things were of lively and lasting interest to me even in my early childhood. It struck me once directly — for example, during a sojourn in Vienna which brought me into the society of my cousins, girl and boy, and diverted me through many kinds of entertainment and amusement — while I was per- forming the natural functions that for several days I had not thought of anything bad. I must more exactly describe a detail which I have already men- tioned to you. My earliest sexual life was in part active (in practice), in part investigation in nature. I was often in the company of an older boy. We played animals ; I crept around on all fours — which I often did in later years in bed at night — and had an erected penis while doing so. I had of course exposed it, which I also liked to do sometimes later before my comrades. In fact, even on the ship at the age of twenty-two I liked to leave my cabin open in summer ; I wore no shirt, and if I became entirely uncovered in my sleep, no one could make any objection. (He does not know that he lies there quite naked.) Of course, I was secretly pleased if some one said to me in the morning he had seen all **my charms." I never took much trouble even before the servant to be sure that ii6 SADISM AND MASOCHISM my nakedness was properly covered. I preferred to perform onan- ism totally naked. You see, I am an exhibitionist. So we played animals. At another time I urinated — or was it my friend ? — and he or I uttered thereby whinnying noises. I re- member in the navy seeing a man once in bathing trunks urinating. I had distinct pleasure in watching him. Now comes a memory to which I do not give absolute credence. It has come to my mind in a quite remarkable manner. We had somewhat longish bread in the navy. Although once I was already satisfied and might just as well have used the rest of the bread at another time, I was compelled as if by a magic power to eat the very last "tip." Then I lay down on my bed and thought a psychological motive must be concealed behind this compulsion. And all at once a memory arose with a certain plastic clearness that an older boy had one time in a definite spot in the garden stuck his penis into my mouth. Before this memory came to my consciousness, I had frequently yielded to a peculiar sort of onanism, which seems to stand in relation with this possible experience. It consisted in laying myself naked on the floor and lifting the feet and lower part of the body. My penis was now over my face, and I would now perform onanism. A further memory relates to my sadistic disposition. I tortured a May beetle and thus had an erection. That was the case always in later years when, for example, I tormented a fly. I remember once playing with my brother in the bath, each milking the other, at which the maid caught us. I have told you in my life history the ideas I had of human origin. Once I took a schoolmate behind a wooden partition and looked at her genital. I bid her urinate. But she had just before at- tended to her needs and could not therefore gratify my wish. I took a blade of grass and laid it in the opening and told her she must always put it back again if it should fall out. Now I came to Vienna. I should mention first that I liked to go around in the neighborhood of the water-closet, evidently with the intention of watching people at defecation. I once had the misfortune that my papa was at the closet and somehow saw me. He went after me in the garden and armed himself with a switch, to be sure, a weak one; whether he whipped me at that time, I no longer re- member. I was soon taught in Vienna where children came from. I also read about it eagerly in the encyclopedia. It seemed to me once, because of a displaced marker, that my papa must have come upon this study. I was seized with the desire to perform coitus. I played father and mother with a little girl. She had to lie down CASE HISTORIES and I pressed her upon the abdomen, which was to symbolize the sexual act. She evidently understood my game well, for she lay down again and wanted me to repeat it. The game of the laying of eggs, which I have already described, belongs in this period. Chance brought me into contact with a laborer who was large and strong. I should like to have seen his penis. But he told me of his prostitutes and said that I must take an interest in that, not in his penis. Once an old woman met me in the woods. I begged her to let me perform coitus. She would naturally not consent. I made more progress with our servant. You already know of these experiences. I had a sweetheart at that time, a girl about my own age, but the love was purely platonic. The servant with whom I had made the attempt at coitus which I have related remained behind in Vienna when we left in my twelfth year and died a few months later in the bloom of youth. Often in coitus with prostitutes of a slender build I have had to think of the pelvic bones and I have an indistinct feeling that perhaps behind this is the thought of that girl's skeleton. My sexual life stands from my thirteenth year in the sign of onanism. I still wished for coitus perhaps, but 1 had grown too bashful. I liked best onanism by another. It happened accidentally that my mamma and, I believe, my papa, too, discovered my habit. I was sitting one day before a package of the samples of the Reklam Univcrsurn and was practic- ing onanism with the most beautiful women which were in it. Mamma entered the room; I did not see her, but really I believe that she saw my exposed organ. That happened also with Papa. One evening he walked up and down before my sleeping room and might have seen me at onanism, which I practiced in a very reckless manner. I found him the next day in the library before a volume of Meyer and thought he was looking to see what one does with children who have become addicted to onanism. But aside from a passing remark concerning a handkerchief soiled with semen ("pretty thing"), neither he nor Mamma ever said anything about onanism. It is true that Mamma's sister asked me in a rather pointed manner why I looked so badly and my brother (who at that time had not yet taken up onanism) so well. I believed that I noticed that this was connected with the discovery of onanism. I had but little satisfaction in my first coitus with a prostitute. The woman seemed to me despicable in contrast with the servant girl who had died, whose vagina, well-covered with hair, came to my memory. ii8 SADISM AND MASOCHISM All the sex acts, which followed at fairly long intervals, chiefly with prostitutes, were characterized by premature ejaculation and slight feeling of pleasure. There was at one time a long inter- ruption, the cause of which was fear of failure. I had proposed to a prostitute that she let me perform coitus while she sat on my lap. (Dr. Stekel has pointed out to me the similarity of the situ- ation with the first attempt at coitus, which failed.) I noticed immediately that this did not work. Since then I have had fear of a disgrace. Sometime later I had a dream: I sat upon a bench among a great number of people, who did not notice me. A red-cheeked girl sat on my lap, and I tried to bring her to my penis. The red-cheeked girl was according to one association Mamma. I interpreted the dream as the fulfillment of the wish to sit upon Mamma's lap. Directly through the analysis of this dream I had the certain, almost proud, feeling that I could now calmly go to the prostitute with whom I had nearly disgraced myself. No sooner thought than done ! She was no longer to be found, but I went to another, to be sure merely with the usual rapid, weak result. Coitus with a chambermaid at a hotel and later with a married woman was accompanied by inhibitions. Report of the second sitting. Dr. Stekel believes that the onanistic act, in which I ejaculated from above into my face, is associated with a fantasy of the mother's womb. Thereupon another fantasy occurs to me. I had the idea of creeping into a large basket and there performing onanism naked. I related more of my desire for animals. Even in early childhood I touched the genital of a cow. At twenty I once wanted a cow to lick me with her rough tongue. I tried once to have coitus with a donkey and another time with a goat. Once I got a dog to lick me. I was frightfully cruel to it after- wards. I was almost ashamed before it that I had let it lick me. Dr. Stekel asked me what it really was that led me to analysis and is of the opinion that I fled from the married woman with whom on account of my impotence and from desire I had prac- ticed cunnilingus. This does not seem so to me. The actual reason was as follows : The woman's husband once praised my cheerful disposition. I answered him that this was only grim humor and all on the outside. Since he knew that recently I had again been engaged in religious studies, he referred my melancholy humor to occupation with metaphysics. But I thought to myself : An actu- CASE HISTORIES 119 ally healthy young man is not interested in religious things. Dr. Stekel referred to my consciousness of guilt as the source of the compulsion to be busied with religion. ... I did not love the woman. It was a tremendous farce that I was carrying on. At the end I could no longer disguise the fact as at the beginning. She reproached me that I did not love her any more. I thought to myself, I have never loved you. Dr. Stekel asked me if I have ever loved. I believe I have really loved only the maidservant. All my other love affairs were distinguished by boundless extrava- gances, which alone are signs that they were not real love. The one goal of my relationships was that / should be loved; I was indifferent to everything else. This hunger for love has its roots in jealousy of my brother. He is better-looking than I and is pre- ferred to me. My aunt's sister once said to me : **No, my dear boy, how lo^^ely you were as a small child and now what have you grown to be i 1 attribute the beginning of my shyness and the loss of my freedom and ease to this remark, which offended me very much. The jealousy of my brother created in me the effort always to equal him. My choice of profession, for example, had its ground in the desire to enjoy the same admiration as the brother, who had been in the navy earlier. Dr. Stekel adds to this that the striving to seek the brother himself was also a determinant. It was actually a comrade of my brother in whose company I was first clearly aware of the homosexual impulses. My efforts to copy the brother bordered almost on the ludicrous. In cutting wood one has first to separate the wood into equal parts. I noticed that he had a sure eye for measurement. Now I practiced with por- tions of given size. I once mentioned that my greatest pleasure would be to fly. But what is further from me? And yet ! Merely because my brother had always been enthusiastic for flying, I presented myself among the aviators. Report of the third sitting. When I was ten years old I performed onanism in an apple for want of a natural vagina. Papa seems to have noticed that I visited the closet all too often. It struck me once that the long space between the two lexicons symbolized much more the slit between the buttocks than the vagina. I therefore once performed onanism purposely with homosexual fantasies. Thereupon an intensive sensation of pain occurred at ejaculation along with the pleasure; it was as if I had SADISM AND MASOCHISM pieces of glass in the urethra. From that time on the book onan- ism was associated each time with this painful feeling. It has frequently happened during a dream analysis that I have had an erection with certain thoughts. I had it with the analysis of the dream of the girl who sat upon my lap ; I masturbated, sit- ting, with great pleasure. Two years ago, after coitus with a hotel maid, I had painful erections for many hours in spite of successful ejaculation. The same phenomenon occurred in the night after the first cunnilingus. I had to perform onanism twice in the night with great feeling of pleasure, thinking of the pubic hair of the servant girl, although in the time previous to this I had indulged but little in onanism. Yesterday I wrote to the woman, with difficulty — I did not know what to write, for it did not come from my heart. I said at the close : *T hope we shall soon meet in oral intercourse." It has often been noticed by my associates that ^ frequently lick my lips. My love to Else is a distinctly spiteful love. I set up her picture in the room at home. Not out of desire, but merely to annoy my parents, I visited her in L., remained away from home a week, and went afterward for a day's visit to my native place, L., without telling my parents where I was actually going. I pretended to them it was my entrance into the national defense. I did not inform them where I really was until I was in L. Later I was seized with remorse and wrote a letter begging their for- giveness. Else's reproach that I had "no temperament" was also a reason for my decision to take up analysis. That is one of the chief differ- ences between me and my brother. I was lively in my early years ; the parapathy has made me serious. I wanted to get my tempera- ment back again. I tried to prove my love to Else by being very generous with gifts. I had bought some material for her birthday. Before I had presented it to her, I received an inquiry from the family at home whether I had not wanted to procure some material. I was sure at this moment that neither Else nor the people at home would get the goods. But finally I gave it to Else, solely to prove to myself that I was not inwardly dependent upon my family. After purchasing a Christmas present I would have an intensive feeling of indifference. My parents are strict as to economy. I could have used the money very well which I spent for the gift. I did what I did only out of defiance. CASE HISTORIES 121 I once had to spend the night in a room with a comrade who had strongly sensuous lips, and I could not sleep at all. It was a case of intentional forgetting when I left semimor pills in my uniform cloak. Mamma had to brush the cloak. I imagined once that I had inflammation of the testicles and made cold applications of sackcloth. I believe I was copying the wearing of the monthly napkin. Another time I considered bits of sabaceous secretion on the member signs of primary syphilis and believed that I would have to confess to Papa. A later association concerning this proved that I had the unconscious wish to show my penis to my father. Now and then I have imagined that I do love Else. The motive of my first student love was the coveting of the happiness of being loved. I saw a comrade being wel- comed by a girl at the railway station — and envied him his great love. Report of the fourth sitting. I will first report some thoughts and fantasies which relate to the person of Dr. Stekel. Dr. Stekel accompanied my first con- fessions of the occurrences of my sexual life during childhood with the expression how "interesting." I thought to myself, "You say that in order to entice more from me." Dr. Stekel charged me to write these notes concerning the treat- ment on one side only so that they could be printed. I thought something like this, "You may tell that to some one else, that this will ever be printed." I always wore my marine cap obliquely on my head. When my attention was called to it, I would always test whether the cap emblem was directly above my nose. It revealed itself that the cap was always a little bit , displaced to one side. The erected penis is always a little to the left with me. I shoved the cap, a penis symbol, always toward the right, as it were to correct the physical defect. I intended to tell Dr. Stekel this. The fantasy attached itself to the idea that Dr. Stekel would have me show him the organ and through some sort of manipulation call forth an erection.'^ I told Dr. Stekel that I had with unconscious intention left semimor pills in the coat which was to fall into Mamma's hands to be cleaned. Dr. Stekel then asked me whether Mamma had shown jealousy. The thought came at once: "Now he is trying to catch you. If you say yes, your secret love for Mamma is revealed." 122 SADISM AND MASOCHISM Therefore I answered : "Not at all ; she is only afraid that I might marry too early." I have very often cherished the fantasy that Dr. Stekel would treat me free of charge. It was somewhat difficult to tell him this. I studied Haeckel and Darwin in the vacation after the sixth class. I occupied myself also with Kant's theory that we have no proof of the reality of the external world. One day this theory awoke to life in me. I doubted everything. Is this a sausage? Is this a leaf? The day after, I was seized by the ob- sessive idea that I must slap my father. The superficial reason why the idea arose is as follows : Our professor of religion had dismissed this theory of Kant with the remark that one need only give its supporter a box on the ear. If he made any objection to that, one could remind him of the unreality of his sensation. I now came upon the notion of scattering my doubt of the reality of the external world through Papa in the manner spoken of. The deeper motivation of this idea, which finally was carried over to everybody and which troubled me for more than a year, is this: Cheeks symbolize the buttocks, and the blow is really a caress.® I am a doubter in everything. I am subject to change of views. Now monarchist, now socialist, now communist. I am not capable of standing firm for any cause. I liked to invent sexual experiences before others; would tell them that I had a girl and sucked her ''glands." I was able to bring about a good result in the "book onanism" when I imagined the lexicons enlarged like an enormous mons Veneris. Or even if I thought to myself that the two lexicons were a child ^ which was sucking me below. I liked to perform onanism in a small sailboat. I was anaesthetic the first time Else practiced fellatio upon me. I should have liked best being licked on the perineum.^*^ Being familiar with the principles of analysis, I ofifered to an- alyze a friend for his homosexuality. I was with him once alone at night and felt a sort of fear at his confessions." The fact that I want to go to the Roumanian marine is explained through Else's returning to Roumania after the peace. I even spoke for some time of a desire to marry her. Nevertheless, I be- lieve my love for her is not a genuine love. Report of fifth sitting. For the first time I have not brought with me the report of the previous hours. For the reason, as Dr. Stekel discovers from one CASE HISTORIES of the following dreams, that I am not going to assist Dr. Stekel to more fame and money through my notes, which are to be printed. Dr. Stekel tells me that no patient has yet been able to write down his analysis. Just on that account, thought I, I will do it. I give Dr. Stekel now the following four dream pictures : 1. A torpedo boat is in a dock like a swimming school, moored between palings. It seems that I pilot the boat. As if we steer through a series of rooms, I wind my way along ; I still see the turnings plainly before my mind's eye. I am dissatisfied with my pilot. He veers too far around for me. Then it is again as if we were in the dock. I see then at the edge of the dock the right pilot. I look down at him and call to him intending to order him to the helm. The poor steersman with whom I was dissatisfied is a former schoolmate. He is a somewhat melancholy person because he — as I have learned — lost his father at an early age. His mother had an affair with a certain person, was killed, and her dismembered body hidden in a cask in a cellar. 2. In the second dream I enter a room. Behind a sort of screen is a lighted desk, at which some one is sitting, presumably my father. I leave the room again. 3. I am in a garret. I say to my father that the Israelite N., a former schoolmate, has bought an automobile for 3000-4000 kronen. He does not believe it. 4. I am disputing with my father and mother across a table. I call out some insulting word which ends in aka. Dr. Stekel instructs me that a resistance has called forth this wealth of dreams. The first dream represents the analysis ; the rooms are the individual chambers of my brain. I am the bad pilot, and the thoughts of the fate of my comrade's mother sym- bolize the criminal instincts in me. The second dream conducts me to an affair in which my father plays a role, but I again draw back. In the third dream I should like to do the analysis myself so that I do not have to sacrifice my savings to Dr. Stekel (3000-4000 kronen). Report of the sixth sitting. We take up the dream in which I was quarreling with my parents across a table and call out to them the insulting word ending in aka. I associate iiraka, urine. It reminds me of an in- hibition in urinating once when I visited a urinal with Papa. I morbidly watched my urine when I was eighteen. I wanted to SADISM AND MASOCHISM have the urine examined. It was impossible for me to urinate in the receptacle for the purpose. Now at the beginning of the analysis I often have to urinate in the night. I have been told that I had the habit regularly of going to the closet after severe night terrors. Once at home I walked in my sleep ; I went, the bed cover over my back, from the first to the ground floor and to the closet. One time, sixteen or seventeen years old, I succeeded in getting sight of my father's penis. In childhood I was always watching the closet and once had the ill luck to be discovered by my father. In my seventeenth year I was seized one time with the fear that I squinted. Now I attribute this fear to my having cast stolen looks in childhood at things which I should not have seen. The report breaks off here, inasmuch as the patient's notes come to an end. They became ever more scanty and passed over the most important things that we had discussed thor- oughly. The circumstance is interesting that in the information given the patient completely ignored the breaking through of the sadistic fantasies. The brief reference to a woman who was murdered and whose corpse was hidden in pieces in a cellar in a cask is the first appearance of the sadism, which manifests the greatest significance in this parapathy. The second dream (dumb person — coffin), too, refers to a dead person (dumb) in a coffin and introduces important necrophiliac complexes. It was plain in the analysis that the hatred was directed chiefly against the mother, who, it was stated, had preferred the brother. But the father, too, came into question as an object of hate and love. Homosexuality and sadism, nar- cissism and exhibitionism, are the pillars of his disorder. One sees that even the exact knowledge of the analysis does not prevent self-deception. The scotoma was of too great ex- tent to permit a successful self-analysis. The bringing of the sadism to consciousness produced at once a good result. But only after two years did he declare himself perfectly well. The interesting letter which he wrote upon this occasion may be found in Conditions of Nervous Anxiety, in the chapter 'Technique of Psychoanalysis." The letter contains a remorseful apology and a confessioa CASE HISTORIES 125 The patient, who always in his reports made fun a little of his analyst, had not been willing to submit at any price or acknowl- edge his sadism. He was impotent with women, whom he wanted to cut in pieces or choke. He could not understand why in his self -analysis he had not acknowledged this sadism. His recovery succeeded promptly upon the frank overcoming of his sadistic attitude. We will deal in the next chapter with the dangers of self- analysis and of analysis in general. XIV THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST Suffering is the condition for the activity of genius. Do you believe that Shakespeare and Goethe would have written poetry, or Plato would have been a philosopher, or Kant have criti- cized reason if they had found satisfaction and contentment in the actual world about them, and all had been well with them there, and their desires fulfilled? We turn to satisfaction in the world of thought only when in a certain degree we have become at variance and dissatisfied with the real world. "Naught but suffering raises thee beyond thyself." Schopenhauer. The staggering fact of the suicide of my friend Herbert Silberer brought before my eyes the great danger which hovers about analysts. Looking back, I can count up a long series of highly gifted analysts who have voluntarily departed from life. They were unquestionably talented men, almost men of genius, men who justified the greatest expectations. Occupation with analysis is a great danger. It is a handling of sharp weapons, which may easily turn upon the analyst. Missriegler has made the striking comparison with Rontgen rays. Many Rontgenologists in the period after their discovery had to pay dearly for their occupation with Rontgen rays, until sad events had led to caution and protective measures. One fact has seemed to me to be striking : the analysts who have committed suicide have either not been analyzed or only for a short time. I know that Silberer had come to analysis solely upon the road of theoretic study. ^ It appears that it is impossible even for the most gifted person to know himself unreservedly. For he employs his genius to destroy the germinating knowledge. Or he makes use of a mechanism which I have designated as a ^'secondary repression." ^ He discovers the complexes, manifests real joy in their discovery, and then proudly believes he has mastered them, as if recognition were mastery. 126 THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST 127 Now the experiences of analysis show that recognition is only the beginning of a longer or shorter psychic process, which must lead to the breaking up of the old ideal, the secret goals of life, and the pathological fixations. To the analysis is joined the work of synthesis of a new life. But the analyst who analyzes himself or is analyzed superficially easily falls into the danger of playing the part of a healthy person and acting as if he were well. I often find that physicians for the purpose of study submit to an analysis which they consider unnecessary because they ostensibly have no complexes ; and the analysis reveals a severe parapathy, which under the appearance of health has withdrawn deep into the unconscious. A second danger for the analyst lies in a knowledge of dream interpretation, of faulty actions, knowledge of the polygamous tendencies of mankind. If he finds it necessary to make use of this knowledge in relation to a beloved partner, he lacks the necessary blindness which is a condition of permanent hap- piness. It is very easy to demonstrate complexes in another, to explain to such a one that all people are bisexual, that they are polygamous, and that unfulfilled wishes express them- selves in the dream — therefore also death wishes. But it is tremendously difficult to direct chis knowledge to one's own life. Repression is a psychic mechanism which preserves the tran- quillity of our psychic life. Only when repression manifests itself as a parapathic symptom have we the right to interfere with it and lift it. Repression becomes more difficult to the analyst because the unacceptable truth is always forcing itself to the front. The analyst needs a large measure of the art of life in order to be happy. Perhaps this explains the fact, which has been stressed from another side, that there are among analysts so many unhappy and chronically depressed indi- viduals. To the art of life belongs also the ability to set aside the analytic knowledge and take life ingenuously. There are analysts who always live in an analytic world. They not only analyze the patients ; they analyze themselves and their environ- ment. I am thinking of a married couple who are analysts, who have taken up analysis because they live a lonely life in i2S SADISM AND MASOCHISM the country without intellectual stimulus. One serves the other as an analytic object. Any one with insight will see that such a situation will lead to endless conflicts. My experience teaches me also that very skillful analysts strive against the admission of the inner motivation of a sym- bolic action; they resort to the objection of the opponents of analysis that it is an accidental occurrence, although they would immediately invalidate such an interpretation on the part of a patient under analysis. Thus an analyst who was working with his analytically trained wife told me that she energetically fought against acknowledging her own symptomatic actions as psychically de- termined. One day he made use of stratagem, and asked her : *'A patient has told me three times already that she has for- gotten her handbag with me. How would you interpret that?" *'It is quite plain. She is in love with you and would like to remain entirely with you. She would like to give you her purse." "Fine! Your dentist has just called me. You have again left your bag with him." She was caught and could no longer deny the symptomatic action. But of herself she would certainly not have done so, or at least would have wanted not to think about it. What impulse more readily submits to repression than sadism with its irradiations? I have very frequently been able to de- termine in analysts precisely this analytic scotoma. Particu- larly as to the most important affective manifestation of sadism, jealousy;^ this subjects itself most readily to primary and secondary repression. We cannot exhaust the subject of masochism and sadism if we do not consider jealousy, which so frequently stands at the service of both impulses. The relations between jealousy and homosexuality are discussed in another place* and are very transparent. Here, too, it is the occupation with the object of the same sex that releases the strongest affects. Jealousy is apparently an identification with another object and a desire for the sole possession of this object. But it derives its most important incentive, althoiigh a social feeling, from an asocial impulse, narcissism. THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST 129 The solution of the specific sexual attitude in all paraphilias lies in narcissism, in morbid self-love. It has been easy for us again and again to demonstrate how the masochist renounces possession of the woman and returns ever and again to his ego. His usually pleasurably toned activity remains the autoerotic one, and the paraphilia is only an indirect course for the auto- erotism. Occupation with his own ego hides behind all these sadistic and masochistic scenes; the latter serve continually to represent the conflicts and division of the ego. The different pathological variations of the sexual impulse are really reflec- tions of the morbid condition within. Thus the masochist and the sadist, and the fetishist, are always engaged with themselves, while they appear to be seek- ing the object of their pleasure outside themselves. They are jealous because their self-love is wounded. They have so high an opinion of themselves that every love must only confirm for them their self-love. Every unfaithfulness leaves them in despair as to their own worth. Othello strangles Des- demona because she mortifies his self-love and justifies those inner voices which say to him: *'You are still an ugly Moor!" It would not be difficult also to furnish the proof of his homo- sexuality. He wants to kill the woman within himself, because he is hopelessly in love with Cassio. We will not, however, lose ourselves in a psychological-liter- ary investigation, but rather reproduce a clinical history which seems to complicate these problems to the utmost. I have no slight difliculty in presenting it and must also alter it in a number of ways for reasons of discretion; this seriously mars its original clearness. Case Number 37. It concerns the forty-year-old analyst, M. K., who has a remarkable antimasochistic attitude. He does battle orally, in writing, also in societies and through personal propa- ganda, for the right of woman. What he cannot endure is a masochistic attitude on the part of a woman. He could murder a man who treated his wife sadistically. But he understands very well how one could be masochistically inclined toward a woman; he considers such an attitude as the desirable one. This fundamental idea dominates his whole thought. He is a champion of mother right, believes that all social problems 130 SADISM AND MASOCHISM would be solved without difficulty through the establishment of the supremacy of women. His books, mostly bulky projects which remain solely in theory, frequently deal with the triumph and the final liberation of women. He could at once fight a duel for an insulted woman, although he is an opponent of duels and other- wise devoted to anarchistic ideas. He desires freedom in every form. But not for all people and only an individual freedom. Thus he has an unquenchable hatred toward all homosexuals, in so far as they are pederasts. If he were king, he would imprison them all, burn them, annihilate them. Therefore a special form of freedom which would pertain only to those who fit his system. Homosexuals are an abomination to him because they despise women and make them superfluous. This strangely affective attitude toward the homosexual man in itself betrays a strongly repressed homosexuality and demands of us that we investigate the relation of his worship of woman to homosexuality. There is many a Don Juan and enthusiastic ad- mirer of women who is really latently homosexual and tries in this way through a false enthusiasm to divert himself from his real sexual object and to bend his leading sexual tendency forcibly into another direction. We will therefore try to find out what is the character of this man's sexual life, and how he has come to transpose the homo- sexual impulsive forces into the extremely heterosexual. He is born of completely healthy parents and has no sort of hereditary handicap. His father, a famous sculptor, took the great- est pains with his education and sought to plant in his mind the germs of all that was noble and beautiful ; his mother, likewise. Both parents are of high intellectual and ethical standing and have devoted their whole strength to the education of their only child. The latter early revealed a pronounced will of his own, which made his bringing up exceedingly difficult. His crass egoism manifested itself in his being unable as a child to share anything, not even love. He wanted every one only for himself : father, mother, and also the grandmother. He was very happy and good, affectionate and obedient, with each one of these persons when he was alone with that one. But he would not tolerate it if he was not the ob- ject of attention in his environment. Unfortunately he learned to know jealousy also among those who brought him up and in its most unpleasant form. Mother and grandmother were jealous of each other and the question, "Whom do you love better ?" was more than once put to him. THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST 131 A disposition toward jealousy developed inevitably in the child mind for two reasons : first, because the disagreeable conflicts over his love brought him constantly into strife; on the other hand, because he himself was exceedingly jealous and the wish for sole possession gave spur to all his criminal (sadistic) impulses. The overcoming of the infantile criminality meant for him, there^ fore, the overcoming of the jealousy. Jealousy was the central problem of his childhood. A strong homosexual inclination toward the father brought him early into an attitude of defiance, which led him completely to differentiate himself from his father and to construct a world philosophy antagonistic to that of the father. He had therefore two contradictory ideals : one was identification with the father, which sprang from his love toward the father (unconscious life goal), and the other differentiation from him (conscious life goal). The guiding line of the latter was clear without knowledge of its origin, while the other was secretly hidden. Inasmuch as a part of the energy gathered about the conscious, another part about the unconscious, motive, a splitting of the ego was bound to result, which may form the basis of any parapathy and as a further re- sult lead also to schizophrenia. The greatness of his "inner con- flict" was expressed by the polar tension between identification and differentiation. The path of heterosexual activity was not pursued with any considerable energy for a long time. The autoerotic course of action remained the only one until the thirtieth year. The prosti- tute was a source of loathing to this man of high intellectual stand- ing, while his overvaluation of woman protected him from seeking gratification in relationships easily formed and easily dissolved. The first woman, a girl, who already had some experiences behind her, won him without difficulty by making aggression upon him. He represents the familiar type of men who are potent only when the women seize them by the genital. (This springs from the tendency "pleasure without guilt" and the specific feminine atti- tude in the strife of the sexes.) It was he, therefore, who was won, and he readily permitted himself to be won. But his secret morality, which directly contradicted his conscious anarchistic philosophy, the ideas which are differentiated from those of his father, permitted him to accept all the consequences. He offered his hand to the girl and married her. But he first made an agree- ment with her which was sacred to him, and which corresponded to his entire view of life. 132 SADISM AND MASOCHISM They were to conduct a marriage free from jealousy. If an- other person should attract one of them, this one might possess that person. That need be no ground for mutual reproaches. This contract was to be a sign of a progressive, liberal world philosophy. In truth it served to exclude jealousy from the mar- riage. It was the secret acknowledgment that through jealousy he could become "frightful.'' It was from this that he wanted first of all to protect himself. The compact was an assurance against his criminality. Another motivation was as unconscious to the patient as the first : in this manner he was able to satisfy his homo- sexual impulses. His wife's lover was then in a certain measure his lover. For as a consequence he tolerated as his wife's lovers only such men as pleased him, tolerated them only when he knew of them. He had to share mentally in the enjoyment in order to forgive. Escapades of his wife of which he learned only later he bore very ungraciously, considering them as actual unfaithfulness and breach of mutual confidence. It is no wonder, since this patient had two things to repress, his criminality and his homosexuality, that he was a morphinist. Morphine or alcohol are narcotics for these unfortunate individuals and make life possible for them. He did not spare the morphine and was able to live only if he took large doses of it. Otherwise he was tortured by anxiety states of the most painful sort. We have often enough stated emphatically: Fear is the fear of one's self. He was afraid he would succumb to his original sadistic attitude if he was not inhibited in his aggressiveness through mor- phine and unable to yield to his fantasies. These, like the fantasies of the opium smoker and the hashish eater, substituted for the poverty of life the fabulous exuberance of the dream world. Now his wife had entered into the pact perhaps more through his urging than from her own conviction, into a pact that would have been very satisfactory to many another woman. Plainly, in the tacit hope that love would help her over all temptations ; glad furthermore that despite her former life she had become the wife of a physician of high reputation and talent. She had saved her- self in marriage, which she had already mentally renounced. But she was not long to enjoy the pleasure of being an "honorable married woman." For the sick man soon urged an experience. He wanted to test her in accordance with his ideas. If any one wants to become acquainted with a classic description of this sort of man, let him turn to the well-known memoirs of Frau Wanda THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST von Sacher-Masoch, the wife of the famous writer Sacher-Masoch. This man, too, masochistically inclined toward women, after whom Krafft-Ebing has named the paraphilia of subjugation, for many years continually urged his wife to commit adultery. He thirsted for such an experience. He hoped to obtain from her unfaith- fulness fresh incitement to his productive work. It was his homo- sexuality which urged him to this step. ... So it was also with our patient. He had but one theme during the first years of marriage, the wife's unfaithfulness and, likewise, his own. But she must make the start. Soon some unimportant officer came within his ban. At her husband's urging she took with him the great step which was to unite them all three to a higher com- panionship. M. K. lay in his bed alone feverishly excited and — performed onanism. Then he waited for his wife and wanted to know whether she still desired him, having had the other one. This was the great test for his narcissism and of her love. Would she return to him after the other man and find satisfaction in his arms ? She came and was again his, whereby he experienced a great increase of the orgasm. This increase came from the influx of homosexual impulses, which M. K. naturally did not perceive, but attributed to the greater love and gratitude because she had returned to him. But the beautiful relationship between the three was not to last long. The officer proved himself unworthy of his high mission. He wished to have the woman only for himself and could not adjust himself to this strange sharing with the husband. The first experience passed without clouding the happi- ness of the marriage. Soon, however, there were affairs which showed plainly that M. K. merely made use of his wife in order to possess his friends. He brought, so to speak, all his friends to her. No friend had any value for him until he had possessed his wife. He likewise made the effort to possess himself of the wives and sweethearts of his friends. It will be clear to any one with insight that this form of polyg- amy must lead to a psychic collapse of all the participants. For M. K. had to suppress all impulses of jealousy, and he was able always to suppress them if his wife's lover each time was his friend. He was always able to arrange it that persons not sympa- thetic to him were excluded from this community. He discov- ered in them ugly traits ; he confirmed pettinesses of character ; he convinced her of their ignoble qualities ; in short, he brought it to pass that his wife should separate herself from them and refuse them coitus. 134 SADISM AND MASOCHISM The affair first became complicated when he at last found a woman who meant much more to him than his wife, and his wife preferred a certain friend — we will call him Arthur — to him. Arthur was a parasite of M. K. He lived upon our patient's ideas and his money ; he lived with his wife ; he even sought to approach his mistress, this, in fact, according to the wish of the patient, who expected from this union a special stimulation of his beloved.^ A complete collapse occurred. His wife turned wholly from him. And it happened this way. When she was pregnant the first time by him, he noticed in her a womanly resignation, which he interpreted as "frightfully masochistic." She was grateful to him. He had made her an honorable woman ; now she would bear him a child. She thought : "Now the temptations are at an end. Now we shall find each other; he will be mine only, and I shall belong solely to him. She yielded herself completely to him as a woman. Now I shall be the mother of his children and a respectable woman. How I love him ! How I love him ! How I can love him for the first time !" He could not bear this and — spurned her love. He wanted to see her only as mistress of him ; he wanted to subject himself to her and live near her at least with equal privileges. Such a submissive wife filled him with fear and disgust. Thus he completely lost this woman. She really never returned to him. What was more important to him than the physical faithfulness in marriage was the mental community. His wife should have understood him, discussed with him his thoughts and projects, his gigantic plans. She was not at all interested in his books, and his philosophical and psychological-analytical conversations left her cold. He wanted to make an anarchist of her. She would not be converted. An anarchistic friend, who became her lover, attended to this conversion, which promptly took place, for women do every- thing for men whom they love. M. K. had to take more and more morphine. He was inwardly unhappy over the faithlessness of his wife and of his mistresses. He wanted in fact to be the only one ! His boundless narcissism longed for some one constantly to admire his genius, an admiration which his wife had not brought him. This tore the two persons utterly apart. He had found another woman in whom he could completely unfold. They understood each other without reserve, and he owed her his most delightful hours and days. But she soon be- came very melancholy. He had the desire also with this woman to bring her into relationship with the anarchist — with Arthur, who, meanwhile, had become the illegitimate husband of his wife. THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST 135 He could not rest until his lovely friend was also Arthur's mistress. He promised himself from this an enormous improve- ment in her condition. Evidently the friend, a woman of good position, could not forgive him this. It is in the nature of woman that she can deceive a man if her feelings demand it, but that she can never in the world forgive his voluntary abdication in the in- terests of another man. It is the severest injury which can be done to her feeling of self. The parapathic condition of the friend did not improve after intercourse with Arthur. On the contrary. Her depression as- sumed ever more severe forms. Her effort to enter into M. K.'s intellectual life was in vain. How could she have found her way among these contradictions ? She took her own life. She was not the only woman whom M. K. had plunged into wretchedness. He not only ruined his women psychically by forc- ing them to unfaithfulness and polygamy, but he made drug fiends of them. He did not rest until his mistresses, too, seized upon morphine or opium, which he preferred latterly. The more he entangled himself in these dangerous affairs, which required so much self-deception and repression, the greater his need of the sweet poisons, which put him into a state of ecstasy where he could forget. What had he to forget? It is evident that he himself could not bear this severe burden of his conscience and his narcissism. For behind his apparent absence of jealousy, there was con- cealed a pathological jealousy with the infantile formula : to have all beloved persons for oneself alone. He had understood how to turn his pain into pleasure, which represents indeed the sign of a true masochism. On the other hand, his entire system was designed to torture his parents with refined cruelty. Here his boundless sadism might vent itself, and it found in them objects which were defenselessly sacrificed to it. He first sought to convert his parents to his philosophical point of view. As he soon saw the impossi- bility of achieving this, he let them bear the cost of his philosophy. They were always having to pay for him, to smooth things over for him, and some new scandal was forever threatening them, even if they had some months of rest. Beside this, there were the ex- orbitant payments for his friends, whom he had to support abso- lutely or to "rescue," and so on. One must investigate the patients who are unable to enter into a good relationship toward their parents, if one would 136 SADISM AND MASOCHISM study the most beautiful cases of sadism. I have never seen such refined cruelty as in sons who have wanted to punish their fathers, and daughters their mothers, for alleged want of love and understanding. As a rule they are not aware that their entire conduct serves to cause their parents pain ; they dissemble and pretend that it was their duty to act thus ; they were them- selves unhappy about it that they could not do otherwise ; and so on. . . . It is seldom possible to convince the parents that this sadism is the result of a pathological, all-too-great love. All sadomasochists are parent-sick! The striving after differentiation led our patient to the most bizarre performances. His father was an industrious man, accustomed to order and regularity ; he was lazy, slept until late, was ''slovenly," disorderly. The father was painfully clean; he was always dirty and unwashed. The father stood for monogamy and father right; he was polygamous and a believer in mother right. The father was frugal, delighted in creative work, was always engaged in some new work ; he was wasteful, did not know how to handle money, could not get his work to- gether, had many intended tasks on his hands, did great deeds only in his fantasy, analyzed only the one person that particu- larly interested him. These cases are of special interest to criminologists. How often it happens that sons lay violent hands upon their parents if the latter do not comply with their wishes ! Sometimes such affective actions occur after a long period of harmony, if some desire or other is not fulfilled. Most frequently, if the parents for important reasons oppose the son's marriage. I could readily refer to a large number of such cases. I will report just one, which happened in recent years in Vienna : An only son lived with his mother in the most harmonious rela- tion. Then he fell in love with a girl of questionable reputation, so that the mother, as one can understand, opposed the union. She sent her son for some months to Italy, and he returned cured of his love. They were talking once of this fancy and the mother remarked : 'Are you not grateful to me now that I released you from this unworthy attachment?" He made no answer, but as the mother went from the house to the garden he seized an ax and killed her. THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST 137 Such cases reveal how strong the hatred may be which exists between those who are related, if unacknowledged incestuous tendencies disturb the friendly relationship. I would even venture the assertion that the sadist betrays himself most read- ily in his relation to his parents and brothers and sisters. While otherwise the sadism seems to be excluded from the whole life, it is the particular delight of these people to cause their parents pain and involve them in embarrassing conditions, especially through the choice of unworthy love objects, sure that they will never obtain the parents' approval of them. Let us turn back after this necessary discussion to our patient. It is interesting to observe how he has completely suppressed all sadistic impulses. He is a great friend of animals ; he cannot kill a beetle. He is careful in walking that he does not tread upon ants, removes snails out of the path so that they will not be stepped on, would never be able to strike a dog, even if it were necessary for its training. But this same man can devise the most refined tortures when it is a matter of harassing his parents. His love relationships in particular form a constant source of conflict. This began with his wanting to rescue a prostitute and his demanding a large sum of money from his people for this purpose. He knew how to vex them and threaten suicide until the poor parents were forced to yield. Then came the choice of the first wife, who had already learned love from other men before him. The parents had to pass with him through all the phases of this, in its way, unique relationship. He naturally brought his next mistress also to the parents. For every love had value for him only if he could bring it into association with his parents. Beside these two affairs, he involved his father in disputes as to paternity, which must have been very unpleasant to the man so sensitive, so correct in his ideas. His wife was with her lover in the south. She wrote to him that she was pregnant and feared that the child would not be acknowl- edged as of legitimate birth, since she had lived apart from her husband for over a year. M. K. immediately went south and spent a night in the hotel where she was living with her lover. He had no intercourse with her. But this night was to be the proof that the expected child was his. The parents heard of the whole arrangement through the indiscretion of a third person. The father wanted to take action and disinherit the child. 138 SADISM AND MASOCHISM This child, which he confessed to me was not his, was the starting point of a tedious conflict with the father. He put him- self in touch with various advocates to end the struggle in a great victory. The father was to be humiliated and compelled to care for the child of a stranger. His severest punishment was however the choice of his friends. He sought for himself, besides fine men with pathological taint, besides eccentric characters, enthusiasts, persons of bad repute of most radical tendency, to whom he clung with all the fibers of his heart. Naturally, such friendship would again have had no value if the father had not had to make material sacrifices for it. These friends were parasites, who like Arthur lived from his money. He contracted debts for his friends, had large accounts for them simply sent to his parents. But he could never attain a correct attitude toward money. Yet only because it was the parents' mone3^ and always to spend money meant : I have no consideration for you and your money. . . .® As the conflicts became ever stronger, and it was finally impossi- ble for the parents to meet all his extravagances, his hatred came openly to light. He believed he now had good reason to hate his parents and wish them evil. He was remorseful within for all these doings and had to stupefy himself with alcohol or opium in order to stifle his re- morse. He became a drinker and finally went to a sanatorium because of alcoholic delirium, where he had to stay a long time. Alcohol may afifect such people in two ways. It either puts aside all inhibitions and releases the suppressed sadism, or it makes them quiet, gentle, wise, and contented. He affirmed now that small doses of alcohol calmed him and made him a better person. There are really some grounds for this efifect. We may not forget that there is a motive underneath all such manias (mor- phine, opium, hashish, cocaine, alcohol, nicotine). These are all psychically abnormal individuals, unhappy persons ! Physical suffering never leads to morphinism. Only the impossibiHty of fulfillment of imagined psychic aims, and the unhappiness arising therefrom, create toximaniacs. Among drinkers are found homo- sexuals, criminals, sadists ; in short, individuals who want to forget the impossible, not to think of the unattainable, to stifle their misery. If it cannot be disputed that alcohol and all poisons in- crease the number of crimes, that intoxication removes inhibitions, yet the experience of psychologists has to affirm also that it tran- quilizcs men who live in constant fear that they must commit a THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST 139 crime. Thus I knew a man who suffered from the (unconscious) impulse to cut up women and who found calmness and the as- surance that he would do nothing wrong only in morphine intoxi- cation. There is no scheme to life, and the bipolarity of all phenomena is manifest also in the indulgence in sources of pleasure which are toxic in effect.'^ The original attitude of this patient was sadistic toward woman and masochistic toward man. With the great reversal of all value? which took place in him, this attitude also was turned about, chiefly, hov/ever, to mask his relationship toward his father. I will now cite some of his dreams, which inform us of the true relationship and grant us a profound insight into this person's psyche. His favorite idea since childhood had been that all those op- pressed should hold together. Thus even as a child he thought that children and servants should conspire together against the pow- erful parents, fight against them, and win the victory. Only persons who cannot obey, that is, who are themselves Caesars, have such dreams of revolution and insurrection. His life was in danger of shipwreck in this respect, that he would not bow his neck before any one — except before persons whom he loved. Commands and violent measures always produced the contrary effect in him. Only love could make him submit. Masochism is not to be confused with a slavish sense. This mistake is often made, and masochism looks then like sub- mission or obedience. If this were the case, all submissive peoples would be masochists. This is by no means true. Masochism is the surrender of a strong individual through love. I have re- peatedly demonstrated even in this work the sadistic roots of masochism. The masochist is the strong individual who becomes weak through sense of guilt and through love. He may then from fear of this weakness fall into an attitude of defiance toward those he loves most. He does evil to them because he can offer no re- sistance to their love. He plays the part of the ostrich and will not see this love. In all of our patient*s dreams the parents, of whom by day he wants to know nothing, play an important role. He lives con- stantly with them in his dream world, even with the grandmother, to whom he has clung closely; from this a gerontophilia has re- sulted which still dominates him to-day. This is what he did in his first alcoholic intoxication : He was living at the time with a good, elderly woman and behaving fairly well. Then he obtained a bottle of cognac which made him quite I40 SADISM AND MASOCHISM drunk. A terrific destructive impulse came to light in his drunk- enness. He broke everything in the room to pieces, heaped up the pieces like a throne, and seated himself upon it. He urinated while there (upon the entire world) and noisily demanded the presence of the old woman, continually repeating: "The old sow shall come to me ! The old sow shall come to me ! The old blockhead shall come !" He betrayed while drunk his belief in his great historical mis- sion : He wanted to traverse the world like an Attila, destroy what is old and build a new world. He, the anarchist, saw himself in his daydreams, as the general of an invincible army, who went from land to land, everywhere freed the oppressed, put down the rulers, and celebrated victories, nothing but victories. This atti- tude will enable us to understand the next dream. It reads : Dr. Stekel has written a textbook of psychiatry. And upon psychoanalytic principles, a book which treats all psychological problems that might occupy a psychiatrist in any connection what- ever. It is the psychology of the personnel in charge, the typical psychological conditions and conflicts of nurses and patients, nurses and physicians, the psychology of the relatives and visitors of the patient, and so on. I see the table of contents be- fore me with the division and subdivisions. One of the main titles reads : The etzcl parents or etzen parents. I notice that I have misread it and that it actually is £/^miparents [Elterneltern] one word).* No hyphen! Yet I think the title £^^^/parents would almost be better. This chapter treats of the significance of parents in the traumatic etiology of the neuroses. One of the subtitles (individual chapter) is this: How far man is an ostrich. This chapter treats of psychology and pathological meaning of imitation (mali-mali). Another chapter is called: How far the one sultan is poronze or pongorze. It treats of the delusion of emperors and its analogous forms in persons of ordinary position. I at first intend to inform myself from the book concerning the psy- chological relationship between patients, nurses, and physicians. But I have later turned from that because the book has interested me very much in itself. I know that I wanted to analyze my grand- mother; that I will cultivate in the institutions certain typical antagonisms and associations, so that under certain circumstances the nurses could combine with the patients against the physicians ; and that this would be of great importance for my case. * Etzel = Attila; etzen = to feed; Eltern = parents (Translator). THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST 141 This dream is interesting because the patient knows that I am working on a book.® He anticipates the content and expects en- lightenment regarding the most important theme of his Hfe: the relation to his parents and grandparents Eltcrneltern, the relation to the persons who cared for him, among whom are to be under- stood in part his parents and in part servants. The Etsel parents disclose the origin of the dream. He read the evening before in a newspaper that Kaiser Wilhelm was called Attila H. In his atti- tude of defiance and opposition, his sympathies are always upon the side of those heroes who are vilified in the history books. Natu- rally, Attila is in his eyes a great figure to whom all historians have done great injustice. The allusions to the sultan (polygamy?) and to the delusions of emperors betray his secret goal : to be himself a great oppressor. To be sure, with the rationalization of all em- perors : the employment of his power for ideal endeavors and es- tablishment of a new era through the introduction of mother right. But the sultan ill accords with woman's supremacy, and further associations reveal a deeper attitude to which we shall soon come : an inextinguishable hatred toward everything feminine, a scorn of the feminine. We can understand from what has gone before that he is unwilling to recognize this attitude. He does indeed play the part of an ostrich. ("How far man is an ostrich.") The refer- ence to mali-mali is a residue from the reading of my book The Beloved Ego. I describe there the imitation parapathy of the Malays, which is called mali-mali. Those stricken with it imitate a certain person to the smallest detail, make all his movements, and so on. . . . He is the victim of a negative mali-mali. While the mali-mali patient identifies himself with his admired object, our patient differentiates himself, as I have already discussed, from his father. His apparent independence is a well-masked docility. His orig- inality is only the negative of another individual, as is well known, the most prevalent form of a deceptive originality. Further associations must be withheld for reasons of discretion. He feels in the day that his relation to his parents is justified and devises new "^ests and new torments, dreams himself into processes in which he will triumph over his parents. And yet every evening when he goes to sleep remorse seizes him. He can- not sleep unless a light is burning in the room. Such people are afraid of their dreams and want to be able to awaken each time and correct themselves through the processes of consciousness. They are afraid of losing the position they have attained with SADISM AND MASOCHISM so much trouble. Religious sentiments break through in the dark ; one becomes a child again; and regret for wasted life, for the pain one has caused one's parents, gains the upper hand. The remorse and the masochistic attitude of the patient toward his parents, especially toward his mother, is most beautifully re- vealed in the following dream : I was at sea with a woman who might have been my wife or my mother. We were in a harbor which was surely that of Corral. I think I know that it is Bombay. There was a warm delightful rain there. We were to go out, and I wanted to put on my gray water- proof shag coat instead of the black one which I was wearing (a shag coat such as I had at one time in Corral). I went down into the ship to get my coat, did not find it, and called for help ; so that my mother should help me to find the coat. I kept calling in loud halloos and spoke in English. When no one answered, I thought to myself I will call so long and so loudly, that I shall be heard across the entire silent ocean even beyond the Australian coast. I then know that I have won distinction for some sort of heroic action on the sea, and two gold stars bordered with red are sewed on my gray coat, one on each side. . . . That some one has wept, or I should have written how some one was weeping, and I have found the expression : He wept until his eyes were suppurating or were inflamed at the edges. It was hard to find the correct expression. It is very difficult to convince any one of the significance of dreams who has not occupied himself for years with their interpre- tation. This dream would be well-fitted to such a purpose. I will avoid the temptation to give an exhaustive analysis. I will merely point out the most important elements. It occurs to him that in Corral he was near "Val divia." This first association already gives us the religious basis of this dream, which is permeated with strong feelings of remorse. The warm gentle rain denotes tears. They are the tears of the parents, es' pecially of the mother, against which he will defend himself. He had still one means of protecting himself against the tears, a waterproof shag coat. This shag coat is the symbol of his para- pathy. It symbolizes the thick skin which the parapathic forms for himself when he causes his loved ones pain. He does not see it. . . . This is naturally a deception. For he does see it, and in the dream of the night the most forbidden thoughts appear with double force. The parapathy then manifests itself as a protection against these thoughts of remorse and as a self-imposed punish- THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST 143 ment. We shall therefore have to accept this waterproof coat as his entire armor or protection against remorse. In the dream he calls his mother like a child and screams until she hears him. . . . Now comes the puzzling part : *T then know that I have won distinction for some sort of heroic action on the sea, and two gold stars bordered with red are sewed on my gray coat, one on each side." This distinction, these golden stars, are the mother's eyes, red with weeping; the golden mother eyes, now overflowing with tears. The last section of the dream is the betrayer: "He wept until his eyes were suppurating or were inflamed at the edges." No other hero bears such a fearful mark of distinction. The mother's eyes red with weeping as officer's stars in life's con- flict ! This dream must fill every sensitive person with horror, dismay, and pity. It is truly incomprehensible that there are individuals who are gripped so intensively by remorse, who long so for their parents love, but who yet cling so stubbornly to their defiance that they are unwilling to admit their regret and are always adding something more to the old wrong. Remember that we have to do with a highly significant man of genius, as in fact the wonderful plastic form of the dreams reveals. His dreams are those of a poet. But we draw nearer to an under- standing of his sadism toward those he loves when we realize that he is so bound to them that every dagger thrust which strikes the father or mother pierces also his own heart. His parapathy is the anarchism turned within; it is the sadism turned against his own ego, which then presents the picture of masochism. Does he actually take pleasure in his pain and in the pain he causes others ? Where is this pleasure premium hid, without which there cannot be such a reversed attitude? Such an attitude must have a profound meaning, otherwise it would have given way under the weight of the feelings of remorse. Before I solve this riddle I will cite one more dream of remorse, which lays bare another component of his parapathy: It concerned animals that were to be fattened. And it was a kind of fattening competition. With certain conditions. Thus, for example, when one beast was fed up, it must be killed at once, and that animal was then out of the race. Then I see before me the image of an overfattened animal, and it was the head of a little pig with lipomatous, irregular accumulations of fat. Then at the end I see myself looking in the mirror and I appear differ- ently from usual, younger with a pug nose, with convex bridge SADISM AND MASOCHISM (I wanted to say concave bridge), very faint blond beginnings of a mustache, and dark shadows in my face. I could paint myself, if I were an artist. . . . Then it related itself — treated of — ob- scurely to a similar contest, which had to do with the war. The king of Serbia had appeared, who was called Alexander and was a rather young, handsome, slender man. Addenda : These animals which were to be fattened were kept somewhere in our garden in N. and in holes in the ground, as pigs are kept in San Vicente. I see the green turf of our garden and think of a definite spot. . . . Any one who has read Oscar Wilde's splendid story. The Picture of Dorian Gray, will at once understand the dream. In the novel the hero sees represented as external ugliness in his portrait all the havoc which his vices have wrought within him. He remains beautiful, but his picture becomes hideous. So it is with our dreamer, for whom the dream sets up a mirror for his psyche. He is fattening an animal in his psyche; he is a pig. In fact, to behave like swine belongs to the obsessive ideas and actions of his parapathy : he does not wash ; he goes about with grimy hands ; his clothes are usually dirty, his hats dusty, his hair is tangled and uncombed ; his room is in disorder, cigar ashes and dust are everywhere, his books in confusion. The fiction, ''You are a pig," is presented always throughout his entire bearing. But we notice that this fiction contains the reproach: ''You are a pig and deserve nothing better. You ought to live in a hole in the ground. Even if you recognize the pig in yourself and strike it down and kill it, a new swine will come. You will always remain a pig; there is no help for you. . . His mind is fattened, degenerated; everything is inharmonious (lipomatous, irregular accumulations of fat). But he observes still more in the mirror of his soul. The pic- ture becomes much clearer, as these dreams are in general very characteristic in that the first symbol is replaced by a second plainer one. He sees himself in the mirror and regards, like Dorian Gray, his own image: totally altered like a common citizen with a small mustache and the deep black shadows in his face. It reminds him of the picture of a criminal. In a further determination, the younger, snub-nosed, mocking face is also the picture of his infantilism. THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST 145 What is the crime that he means? The reference to Alex- ander of Serbia is plain enough. Alexander was murdered by his officers and the body of Draga Mashin, the parvenu queen, was wounded and mangled by numberless sword thrusts. The officers were said even to have cut out her genitals. The crime therefore can only be regicide and lust murder. He proudly confesses to anarchy. But we know that the murder of kings is in the program of anarchy, for the latter tolerates no rule of another. Not to be able to obey is in fact the illness of our patient. If one has the opportunity to analyze an anarchist, one will be able to confirm my observation that it is always a matter of displacement from the individual to the social, from the small to the great. I have studied the life history of a large number of anarchists and have strikingly found among them many illegiti- mate children, who have transferred their hatred toward the unknown father upon all authorities (examples in earlier vol- umes!). The analysis of such a youth, who fortunately was cured and freed of his anarchy, which represents the sharpest form of the social parapathies, afiforded the same point of view. He did not know his father, but was aware that he was still living. He could not learn his name from his mother. But he repeatedly expressed himself : *Tf I meet him, I will strike him down or strangle him. . . Later he became an anarchist, read passionately writings concerning anarchy, and sought out circles of these people, who all make the world responsible for their unhappy childhood. Our patient, too, stood under the ban of fierce hatred of his father. I have already shown that all his actions were centered in agitating his father and causing him pain. Every hatred is deadly, and this hate, too, revolved about father murder. The king becomes the symbol of the father. Alexander is the father. . . . Another dream confirms this assumption. It reads : It was between a dream and a hypnagogic picture. . . . The punishment was to be inflicted upon me as in ancient Rome, where persons were laid together with three animals and drowned. So I was to be packed in a large traveling basket and with me a fat 146 SADISM AND MASOCHISM old cook, a little boy, an old watchman with a coarse mustache, who had soiled his trousers. Then obscure . . . that previously a dead cock had been put into the trunk, which — I believe — had been strangled and the tail cut off or pulled out. The cook (female) had a faint gray mustache and a fat, some- what oldish face. . . . The boy was an elementary pupil with blue eyes and a straw hat. The watchman I see with his trousers let down, with a heavy martial mustache and a distressed expression on his face corre- sponding to his situation. Any one who knows Roman history is aware that in Rome patricides were thrown into water and drowned together with a dog, a cock, and a serpent. Sometimes there was also a monkey.® He is a patricide and must receive the just punishment for his murder. Yet what is the meaning of the figures that are to die with him, the cook, the watchman, and the emasculated cock ? And the little fellow ? They are all split forms of his own psyche, personifications of its various partial impulsive strivings. He is an out-and-out child. Many of his parapathic traits are simply infantilisms. This infantilism is personified in the little boy. The ob- stinate adherence to his infantile attitudes appears clearly in the dream. The dream says : The child in me will first die with me ! Even so the dead cock, the tail feathers of which, its greatest ornament, are torn out, personifies the sorry remnant of his manhood, the end of his polygamous efforts, of his high flying, of his ambition, and his castration fantasies. The old cook is already characterized through her gray mustache as a bisexual symbol. Love to the servants was always a prominent feature in his character. But here the cook represents the caricature of his feminine component. The ''soiled" watchman symbolizes consciousness and its entire con- tent. Consciousness watches jealously that all his unconscious attitudes (love and adoration toward his father, the reversal of this unnatural love into an unnatural hate) shall be kept from consciousness. The picture of this watchman shows that these strivings have reached disaster. The conscious individual, too, THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST 14/' will die with the murderer, the child, and the woman in him. . . . We should assuredly err if we conceived of the hatred as a feeling existing in itself, the only determining one. All psychic phenomena are bipolar, and we know already from numerous examples that there is no more a hate without love than a love without hate. I am, as is known, of the opinion that hate sig- nifies man's original, primary attitude. The child begins to hate at the moment when one places oneself as an obstacle in his way. Children's outbreaks of hatred manifest themselves in the first years of life as convulsive crying spells (so-called hold- ing of the breath), later in attacks of rage, and in epileptiform seizures. This infantile reaction appeared in our patient. He hated everything which set itself in the path of his desires. He wanted to possess everything, even the beloved persons, for himself alone. If he was with the father, he hated the mother because she disturbed the intimate association and the father busied himself with her, talked to her. His boundless egoism first manifested itself in his wanting everything only for him- self. One understands, therefore, how he constructed an atti- tude for himself in which he resigned his wife also to others. It constituted the tragedy of his life that this attitude was merely the conscious and external one, and in this he was in danger of ruin. For in the bottom of his soul he was ab- normally (one may say pathologically) jealous. But he could be angry also at the father because the latter disturbed his being together Avith the mother. There was in him a wild primitive instinct, which with a different bringing up could have made him a criminal. He had frequently to battle with himself not to commit an act of violence. His wife had the bad habit of being sullen and not answering, behaving quite negativisti- cally. He would then press her with questions, and when she did not respond he felt the impulse to fall upon her, strike her down, throw her to the floor, choke her. He once attacked his mother, who had to flee from the room and feared her last hour had come. His murderous and fighting instincts had still other forms of manifestation. He learned Japanese wrestling, was enthusiastic for the duel (imagine an anarchist as devoted 148 SADISM AND MASOCHISM to the duel!); he reveled in endless daydreams in which he victoriously led great battles, liberated peoples, and subjugated others. But his hostile attitude toward his father is not the outcome of his criminal nature nor his rebellion against authority. There is much more in it than these. The murderous defiance of one unhappy in love lies at the base of his parricidal attitude. He feels himself rejected and despised. How is this possible with a father who has devoted all his powers to him, whose whole thought and effort have gone to making smooth the path of life for his son? It probably comes from the fact that in the unconscious wishes have been roused which the father could not suspect, much less grant. To speak plainly at once : Our patient is homosexually inclined toward his father. He was always expecting from his father a sexual aggression, which was the only thing that could satisfy him. Like many men, he is impotent if the woman is not aggres- sive and does not seize his genital. (This sort of impotence on the one hand goes back to the motive "pleasure without guilt," and on the other a homosexual desire easily conceals itself behind it. For the hand is not a specifically feminine characteristic.) He can for this reason easily dispense with coitus and prefers to limit him- self to mutual onanism. I have always found this form of sexual relationship in those who want to mask their homosexuality. A dream now discloses to us what he expects from his father and also opens new ways to the understanding of his sadistic posi- tion. He dreams one time r I am talking with my father and am very much annoyed with him. We have a very great difference of opinion, and I am trying to convert him to my point of view. Then my father seizes my genital. I experience an exceedingly strong orgasm and remember that I am quite defenseless. He awoke from this dream with a violent feeling of anxiety and could not go to sleep again, he was so agitated. He expected a homosexual attack from his father; he expected sexual relations. His attitude to the parents was bisexual as follows : He wanted the father to take the place of the mother and the mother the place of the father. He wished to be a man with the mother and a woman with the father. He changed this attitude into its opposite. He wanted to be a woman to women and a man to men. THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST 149 Another standpoint to be obtained from this dream is of greatest significance. We note that he employs the device of many para- pathics in that he protects himself against an excessive love through hatred. He always feared for his independence. And there was one means that made him defenseless and that was — love. He knew that he was without protection against his mother's and his father's love. He sought occasions to escape into the combative position of the oppressed. He acted in the same way with his wife and his mistresses. He discovered when his wife was preg- nant that she loved him very much. She revealed in her glance so much affection and devotion that he could not bear it. Why could he not tolerate this devotion? He rationalizes it for himself : **Be- cause I cannot suffer the masochistic attitude of a woman even toward myself." In reality, because he feared to lose his defense. For he felt that if his love once belonged wholly to any one, then he was lost. For this reason he had beside his wife also a mistress ; beside the mistress, still other women. The danger existed at that time that his free marriage would change into a good ordinary marriage. He had to escape this danger. He thrust his wife from him. With this his life was crushed. He increased his protective measures, he strengthened his reversions, he came close to the bor- der of paralogy, so that he entered an insane asylum on account of ^'dementia praecox," where he was interned for two years. He lived in enforced abstinence. No opium and no women ! At his wish he came to me. I gave him complete freedom. A forced- withdrawal treatment is worth nothing! He made a transference to me at once in the analysis and at- tached himself with all his love to me. But as soon as he learned that he might submit to me, he clung again to the first wife, whom he met in his freedom and — whom he wanted to marry at once. Always the opposite extremes ! On the one side, sexual freedom ; on the other, marriage. Yet neither this woman nor I could bind him, although he declared that he could not live without us. He made his escape at the first opportunity in order to preserve his personality and not to succumb to the power of love. His whole life denoted a flight from love, an evasion of every genuine feeling and every true sexual impulse. His son was hated by him after a little scene, or shall we rather say became intolerable to him. The little five-year-old came into the room in his shirt, turned to his father, laughed mischievously. SADISM AND MASOCHISM and showed him his bare bottom. Another father would have laughed at this childish artlessness. But he took the matter seriously, was immediately seized with unbearable disgust. He had from thi« moment a secret horror of the child and could no longer be affectionate toward him. He saw in the child a reflection of his own infantile attitude. The child showed him the erogenous zone of the existence of which he had his whole life wanted to know nothing, which he had endowed with every possible affect of repudiation. He had that fear of love which makes every more intimate approach impossible. The circumstance, too, that he brought other men to the women he loved, was due not only to the homosexual instinctive force, but to the inability of binding any person entirely to himself only and to the fear of complete sur- render to the love of any person. Splendid isolation ! — is the watchword of such natures. One has to search for their daydreams if one would learn to know them and to discover why, despite colossal endowment, they make no progress. A greater part of the day is spent in these day fantasies, which appear in still greater measure as the result of alcohol. I have already mentioned the day fantasies in which our pa- tient becomes emperor of Japan, founds a new realm, eradicates homosexuality, in so far as it rests upon pederasty, with fire and sword, introduces mother right, exalts "psychoanalysis" to a national science, and so on. . . . Another quite different series of fantasies is occupied with thoughts of isolation. I will present two of these daydreams, which will bring us closer to the understanding of his sadistic disposition. A day fantasy: A house that stands in the midst of a great, level, primitive forest ... so that the ancient trees lean toward and over the house. Moss all about. There live a pair of lovers with a small boy, whom the mother initiates into love. The man lives there perhaps to make archseologic excavations, to search for an old ruined city forgotten in the forest. The woman who accompanies him is a great singer who has lost her voice and therefore withdrawn from the world. The two have formerly lived in great freedom. The woman has traveled as an artist throughout the world. On one such journey she accom- panied a coV>nial officer for a few months into a lonely fortress and on that oo'asion discovered this place of ruins. Then later, while THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST 151 the man is making preparations for a sojourn during the investi- gation of the ruins, she falls ill with diphtheria in some other part of the world and loses her voice. They no longer separate after this; the man will not permit the woman to leave him because of the fear of her dying alone, a possibility which has been brought home to her, and the woman retires from the world because her art is at an end. They now live in solitude in the depth of the forest that together they may make their research and bring up their son in freedom — far from mankind. Addition to the fantasy (while the first is very old, infantile, the second part is recent) : The woman cannot have another child beside this first one because she has become sterile through a dagger thrust which a lover gave her out of jealousy of her hus- band. A scene pertaining to this, how she is going through Paris on the arm of her husband ; the lover attacks her, stabs her, and is killed by her husband. . . . Dream of the following night : There are two banknotes. The thing is to find out which is rela- tively the cleaner, since it is necessary to introduce this note into a woman's uterus. One would certainly not recognize in this fantasy, which accord- ing to the patient's statement is primitive-infantile in the first part, the daydreams of a sadist, if the added portion had not illuminated the entire situation like a flash of lightning. The woman whom it concerns has become sterile by being stabbed in the abdomen ; a man has been killed. The fantasies always end in murder and homicide, but it is always a noble crime, always rationalized through honorable motives or as self-defense. Favorite fantasies are particularly those in which because of insult to a woman a duel is fought and the opponent is stabbed or shot. The heroes of these fantasies drip with noblemindedness. They are not jealous. Thus the hero receives the woman because she has lost her voice, although she has had a relation with a colonial ofHcer. Worthy of note is the incest relationship between mother and son, the latter being initiated into love by his parents, chiefly the mother. One can recognize in this childish fantasy the wish to have the mother for himself and to renounce all the rest of the world. This fantasy is fully understood only when we recognize that it has to do with the three components of his psyche — man, woman, and child — which are finally to be united in a harmonious whole. His entire life is a struggle over the three in one, to which he has 152 SADISM AND MASOCHISM never been able to attain. The man who is going to make archseo- logic excavations is himself. This refers to the analysis, the in- vestigation of his own psyche. He did in fact make the impossible attempt to analyze himself (as he wants to do everything him- self— the typical autoerotist !) and believed that he knew him- self and was cured. The woman in him is, however, still sterile; she has lost her voice. (Think of the dream in which he screams across the silent ocean!) The singer has come to the end of her art ; that is, he has quite given up the hope of homosexual satisfac- tion; he has killed the woman in himself and stabbed the lover, slain everything which he loved as the feminine in himself, sub- dued it, made it psychically worthless. But we observe from this fantasy that jealousy plays an enor- mous part in his life. It has been displaced in the fantasy upon some one else, the lover ; and this lover is dead. We easily realize, however, that he is the lover and that he might destroy a woman out of jealousy. Now we know, too, why he may not be jealous. He fears his sadistic attitude toward woman. For he struggles with the impulse to stab a woman, stick a dagger into her abdomen, and become a lust murderer. He dares not be jealous, and he must assume a masochistic posi- tion of obedience toward a woman in order to escape this greatest danger. The little dream which he has related in the midst of his fan- tasy betrays him just as much. As we know, our patient suffers a money parapathy. In this dream, money is represented as dirty, and he hesitates between two notes which are to be put into the woman's uterus. I have pointed out in my work The Language of the Dream in discussing symbolic comparisons that many people treat money as if it were semen. Here a woman is to be fructified through money. The symbolism of the filthy thing forces itself into the fantasy of diphtheria, in the form of infec- tion. He is infected, infected with an evil poison, defiled. . . . We know that under this he means the evil parapathy and the poison of incestuous love. He has lost his voice because he re- mains forever a child and cannot free himself from his parents. He cannot earn. He is the woman who must be supported by money from her parents. He is dependent upon the love of the mother and the father, and he questions himself which love he would rather accept. . . . Both ways are filthy; they are incest desires. . . . The central point of each dream, of the daydream and the fan- THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST 153 tasy, rests upon the stubborn holding fast to the infantile and the infantile attitude. He will be a child and not give up his infantile ideals. . . . He also of¥ers a passive resistance to treatment and reeducation, which conceals itself behind an apparent willingness to change and build up a new life. We discover this from a fantasy which he refuses to tell, be- cause it is too stupid and he is ashamed to relate such stupid things. This motive is often met with in parapathic women, when they are asked to tell their dreams. "I can no longer remember such stupid things !" Or : **I will not burden you with such stupid material !" I was able to respond to our patient: *Tf your fantasy was not too stupid to occupy you a whole day long, you can tell it to me !" And finally, under the most violent resistance and with a continu- ous struggle, interrupted with all kinds of interjections, he relates to me the fantasy with which he had been engaged in the last days : I have conquered a portion of New Zealand and there set up a state of my own, which unites in it all that modern culture and skill have achieved. The highly cultivated inhabitants conclude a treaty of protection and defense with the Papuans, who dwell on the south coast. They repulse every attack of the enemy and carry on a brisk trade. The island is splendidly isolated and so cleverly managed that outsiders who want to force their entrance are all destroyed. We see again the proud isolation. The island is his ego, which appropriates all that civilization has won and makes use of it, but triumphantly defends itself against all foreign influences. His ego is however in association with the infantile and primitive, with the instinctive people, symbolized by the Papuans (primitive man). Savage and civilized man enter into an alliance and defend them- selves against external influence. That means in plain terms : I will remain as I am, half savage, half civilized. . . . The sadistic trait appears from the conflicts, the relations to the cannibals, from the sudden attacks which are to be made upon intruding strangers. I have already emphasized that the disposition to lust murder was compensated through reversion to the opposite. The aggres- sive impulse would originally have been directed only against the factors which disturbed the pleasure. The formula would be: I hate you because you disturb me in my pleasure, and therefore I should like to put you out of the way. The quality of pleasure was not bound with the idea of getting rid of the person. There was merely a gradual welding of the two SADISM AND MASOCHISM ideas, and the pleasure character attached itself to the murderous thoughts. One must also consider that to kill any one means to possess that one entirely and have dominion over him. The mur- derer dominates his victim and proves to him that he is master of his life and death. The murderer plays the part of fate, even fre- quently of a punishing divinity. If we turn this knowledge upon our patient, it must help us to understand his relation to his parents. He hated his mother when she disturbed him while with his father; he hated the father when the latter took his mother from him. But soon he came to a hostile attitude toward the entire female sex. Why? Because women would not conform to his desire. Thus he relates that even as a small boy he went to the grandmother and made an aggressive attack upon her bosom, which she repulsed, more horrified than angry. He began to hate all womankind because they looked upon him as a child and not a man. There was one way in which he could show himself their master. If he killed them. A knife, a revolver, a tiny bottle of poison, would make of David the conqueror of Goliath. The ancient tale ! The weapon to increase the size of the little one ! As a child he was always wanting weapons. None of the members of his house- hold guessed what it was he desired and longed for. The act of murder became the symbol of possession. It is also sexual union ; the revolver or the dagger represents the phallus, the blood the semen. Murder is therefore the sexual act of the impotent man. There is not a fully potent man in my gallery of imaginary "Jack the Rippers." The potency of our patient is also a disturbed one. (He anx- iously avoids all aggressiveness.) It bears a passive character. I have already pointed out that playing with the murderous thoughts excluded the aggressiveness and demanded a turning of the sadism into masochism. He fled into the passive, feminine, submissive attitude. On the other hand, the impotence had to bring again the association: I should like to show myself to the woman as master and man. This position toward woman, from which he expects all good but to which he wants to be subject, is of the greatest significance. Many are the men who expect the woman first to make an attack upon the phallus before they become potent (I have described them fully in Volume IV). Our patient, too, was not ashamed to in- struct the women that this seizing of the phallus is the fundamental condition of his potency. This reveals, beside the already em- phasized attitude ''pleasure without guilt," another arising from THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST 155 childhood : The female and male persons of the environment should guess what he wants without his having to tell them. They should carry out the aggression upon his phallus. The dream of his father discloses this point of view. . . . The parents should discover what he wants even when he says the opposite! It is one of the most refined artifices of the parapathy that it is so fond of transforming its goals into their opposites. The parapathic, for example, will want to be left alone and in peace, and will be furious if his wish is granted. He wants merely to conceal that the presence of his family has become indispensable to him. He wants them however to perceive the truth. The husband of a parapathic woman asked my advice one time as to how he should treat his wife. I told him : "Always do the opposite of what your wife asks of you." He obeyed, and notwithstanding apparent conflicts he got along with her better than before. She demanded that he should come to her for three weeks on the Riviera. He knew that she wanted to be alone, but that she was seeking to silence the voices of her conscience. The husband was not to know that she desired his absence. He wrote that to his regret he would have to decline her invitation ; he was prevented from com- ing. Her conscience was now at rest, after she had written him that she could not stand it, she would die there alone ; he should come for God's sake, and so on. . . . He implored her to remain there, her health required it. Thus he fulfilled her own secret wish to remain alone, while she apparently continued to please her husband. It is characteristic of all parapathics that they always want that which they cannot have. This tendency is most strongly in evidence in masochism and sadism. One has entered into conflict with one's ego and believes that one has come off conqueror. Thus our patient, too, considered his parapathy as a conclusion, as a world philosophy, as something finished, while it was only a transi- tion, an artificial construction, a routine measure. His entire thinking was now controlled by one force: My orig- inal disposition may never again come to light! I will permit my- self to be subjected again to all the world, but not to my parents! It was in a certain sense a struggle for freedom that the boy was carrying on. He wanted to free himself from his family, from his love to his parents ; wanted to escape in his love to other persons, to the whole world. He could not effect this liberation because it was built upon parapathic principles. His differentia- 156 SADISM AND MASOCHISM tion was only a negative form of family slavery. Analysis, which put new weapons into the patient's hands, was especially danger- ous for him. He analyzed himself and had himself analyzed by other physicians, who were themselves under analysis by him. This is naturally impossible. So important a man as he had it in his power to dupe all his physicians and make them believe that his attitude was the product of his philosophy. They all over- looked the anarchy directed inwardly, the transformation of his positive forces to negative. He should not have attained his world philosophy until after the primary attitude had been revealed ; then it would have been his own. He was still more confused through the self-analysis and the various half analyses than he had been before. He had to per- mit a second repression to follow the first. The love to his parents began to make itself known hesitantly; he received insight into what was within that made him shudder at all that he had de- stroyed in himself because his demands upon his parents had not been fulfilled. Like all men who wish to be blind, he had to grasp after means for narcosis. He became a morphinist — with a re- markable rationalization : He needed the morphine that he might remain good. In the morphine intoxication he could be the good child, could think of his parents, forget the unspeakable misery he had brought upon himself and his family. An inner voice was always calling to him : You are a criminal toward yourself and yours ! This voice cried and cried without intermission. It would not let him sleep; it would not let him work; it would permit none of the joy of life to arise in him. This voice had to be silenced, cost what it would. So he began his fearful work of de- struction, which brought him hard upon the border of madness and behind the locked doors of the asylum. For in all the cruel blows which he dealt himself, there was a pleasurable moment full of bitterness at the thought : How hurt your parents will he when they learn of this! This should be their punishment. This infantile defiance be- came ankylosed through repetition of the parapathic mien. The rigidity where there should have been psychic plasticity permit- ted the suspicion to arise that this might be ''dementia prsecox." This suspicion, voiced by many psychiatrists, proved unjustified. It was a severe parapathy which, to be sure, presented almost as great obstacles to his life's possibilities as a paralogy. We shall frequently meet cases in life in whom the general sadism is re- duced to individual persons. They are usually the parents or other THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST 157 beloved individuals, who then attract to themselves the entire sharpness of the cruelty, while all the forces of love are squandered upon unworthy objects or such as have only fictitious value. . . . It was a hard task to mobilize this psychic ankylosis. He knew first how to employ the stratagem which so many analytically trained and untrained are in the habit of using: they prevent a transference through a recent (usually fictive) passion. I knew that the patient would transfer to me his negative attitude toward his father, and that he would with all the means at his disposal avoid a positive transference. He came to me from a private institution, where he had been interned in confinement for two years, a broken man. I gave him first his complete freedom, stating only two conditions: i. You must promise during the treatment to take no narcotic drug. You are now weaned from this, forced to it, it is true, through your internment. Now you are to remain sober of your own free will. Narcotic substances make any analysis illusory. 2. You will fall in love with the first female that crosses your path. That would likewise be the end of the analysis. Promise me to enter into no new relationship so long as the analysis lasts. The patient gave me his solemn promise to keep both conditions if I would bring it about that he should be removed from guardian- ship. He feels himself as the slave of his parents and deprived of all his rights. I made him to understand that that was also my goal. He should receive complete freedom, for according to my opinion the diagnosis of ''schizophrenia" could not rightly be maintained. Per- haps a sort of financial trusteeship would be necessary, for his pathological mania for spending would require control until, cured of his ''money complex," he should have free right of dis- posal of his means. He relapsed even in the first week. We were at a small sum- mer resort. I had warned the apothecary and forbidden him to dispense narcotics to the patient. He broke open the medicine closet of the sanatorium in which he was staying for convalescence. Later, also, he was able to procure opium for himself in spite of all precautionary measures, taking it in larger and smaller quanti- ties. There was a constant battle in which I would finally have come off victor had not external forces interfered in the analysis. There was just one female person in the sanatorium who came into question as a love object. I wanted to make sure also in this direction. She was an intelligent girl, who had a position as sec- SADISM AND MASOCHISM retary. I took her into my confidence. I warned her of the con- sequences of any sort of a relation. I pointed out to her that the cure of this man of genius must come to pass first through analysis. She, too, promised me solemnly in no way to obstruct my efforts. Besides the man was ugly, had carious teeth, a frightful odor, and as far as she was concerned did not come into consideration as a man. She had nothing but the utmost pity for him. But the idea of a kiss already made her nauseated. She had given him the first kiss after only two weeks. He had at last found his ideal, who would save him. This girl was the figure of light whom he had sought his whole life long. It was not infatuation; it was not flight from the transference; it was true, high, holy love. The power of his word had fascinated the girl. But not her alone. The whole family came under the spell of this demonic personality, and the sisters and brothers were still more in love with him than was his ideal. In their eyes there was only one great man of genius who could save mankind, and that was my patient. I will anticipate and state that he naturally trained his bride to the taking of opium and later of cocaine. He regarded the whole family as his private harem. I will for reasons of discretion say nothing of further entanglements and transgres- sions. Under such difiicult circumstances did the analysis proceed. Should I give up the struggle? Should I declare myself defeated through his artifices even in the first weeks? I went on with the treatment, and my patient endeavored to prove that despite love and opium he could make tremendous progress. The first love attitude toward his parents came more and more clearly to light, ever more clearly the voice of conscience, ever more plainly the Philistine who was concealed behind the noble anarchist. He defended himself against the new revelations; he often increased the doses of opium, came to me in an intoxicated condition, but I had him firmly in my hands and did not relax my hold. Then the World War broke out. The patient's excitement can scarcely be portrayed. He naturally placed himself at once on the side of the Russians, because his father was a German nationalist. The English and French were also sympathetic to him. He wanted to hasten over to the enemy and fight for freedom. His latent sadism was drunk at the thought of the murder of masses. It should have been expected that he would take a position against the war as such. No trace of that was to be observed. He was well known as an anarchist and suffered from the fear that he THE TRAGEDY OF AN ANALYST 159 might be observed by the poHce and annoyed. This fear was only temporary and was in no way elaborated to a delusional system. He had reason indeed to be concerned in regard to this, for he had repeatedly had conflicts with the police on account of his anarchistic opinions. I at once presented myself for service in a **Red Cross hospital'' and secured for my patient a place in the same hospital. I hoped myself to be delivered from an intensive piece of work. He proved himself a very skillful, humane, and hard-working physi- cian. I often had to take him under my protection, for he was still always dirty, seldom washed himself, and made an impression of neglect. The analysis was reduced to rare explanations. Suddenly he offered himself to a hospital for infectious diseases and was gladly accepted, for he had chosen one of the most disagreeable and dangerous of posts. I mention forthwith that he acquitted himself with distinction and was honorably mentioned ; he even published some scientific works. Our relation was now peculiar. He had tried before this to force upon me his bride, whom he meanwhile had deflowered, and he was very sly about this. He sent me every day a letter to his betrothed, which she was to get from me. An incredible ration- alization: The bride is frivolous and dirty and will not wash her hands. I am circumspect and clean and will do it. I sought to break down this absurd reasoning, absurd because the letter from the infectious hospital (cholera, and the like) came eventually into the bride's hands, and I told him the analytic truth : "You want to set up the old constellation. I should become your bride's lover. I urge you to send your letters directly to your beloved." Analysts are also usually blind to their own complexes. The man who had directly ofl"ered his wife to every friend, had even forced her upon them, was hurt because I knew him and saw through him. I did not hear from him for a long time. He was mortally oflfended. I learned from another source that he had gone into all sorts of things but was cautious enough not to get into conflict with the law. I was to hear from him just once more. He sent me the manu- script of a work. It was a work of genius, like all his works, and I arranged for its publication. My astonishment was great when he reproached me in a letter with plagiarism. I had used his idea of the "will to subjection" in my latest book. A reference to a i6o SADISM AND MASOCHISM book of mine that had appeared years before, in which one chapter, "The Will to Subjection," had discussed this idea at length, con- vinced him that he had done me an injustice. He wrote me a letter of apology. Shortly afterward, he died of an intercurrent disease. A hope of analysis sank with him into the grave. It was hii* misfortune that he had learned to know analysis before he was analyzed. Analysis was then a severe task. It would nevertheless have succeeded if the war had not intervened. This case plainly shows us how a precociously developed in- telligence may become the evil destiny of a man. M. K. was precocious as a child and revealed even in his earliest years the signs of extraordinary talent. He was a youthful prodigy and passed for a genius. Only with such an excessive intelli- gence was it possible to think out and adhere to this system, in which all values were reversed. His ungovernable obstinacy did not permit him to change himself or to abandon the position he had once taken. All his energies were then employed in maintaining the parapathic transformations. The first superfi- cial analyses were his undoing. They simply plunged him more deeply into the unconscious abysses, inasmuch as he, a master of dissimulation, was able to deceive not only himself but also all his physicians and first analysts. The polar tension be- tween his conscious and unconscious tendencies was too great for him to bear it for any length of time. Insanity would have been a salvation for him. Yet the keen intellect was on the watch and prevented complete introversion. Thus he stood between paralogy and parapathy, incapable either of complete extraversion or total introversion. Analysis would have been able despite all resistances to accomplish this task if it had recognized from the very beginning that behind the masochist a bloodthirsty sadist was hidden. To be sure, one must be very cautious in such cases. The truth must be administered in homeopathic doses. XV SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION Fatal are those attacks of rage that are always likewise at- tacks of weakness. Alfred Grunewald. The phenomenon of ''pleasure in pain" leads to the strangest manifestations. Persons inflict wounds upon themselves or accuse themselves unwarrantably of most serious crimes, in order to receive the punishment dictated by the unconscious. The motive of "suffering innocently" is found among many masochists. The hidden motives for this attitude may be dis- covered only by analysis. Behind the masochism are concealed the sadism which we have learned to know and the sense of guilt that springs from it, which craves a punishment upon earth that it may escape the punishment of the Supreme Judge. It would lead too far to mention all the follies to which the feeling of guilt leads these parapathics. There is the woman who reveals such a mania for operation that under the delusion of severe illnesses she misleads the most experienced surgeons to attempt a variety of operations; there is the man who runs to the police and accuses himself of a murder which some one else has committed; furthermore, the woman who receives anonymous indecent letters, is in despair over them, hastens to the police, engages private detectives, until it finally comes out that she herself has written the letters. Such an example shall occupy us somewhat more closely, for it grants us deep insight into the masochistic psyche. Case Number 38. A Russian professor of philology, a great man in his profession, came to me one day to be cured of his various disorders. He made a woeful impression. He described himself as the most unhappy man in the world. His whole life long he had been pursued by ill luck. He had already been analyzed twice (by laymen) without result. A mental disease had broken 161 i62 SADISM AND MASOCHISM out during the first analysis, classified by the psychiatrists as paranoia. He had lost his position because of this and was now without a situation. The tears ran in torrents down his pale cheeks during this recital. His wife was his only joy; she had stood by him in his heavy hours and saved him from the greatest acts of folly. He had learned to know her in a remarkable manner. He had been sent by the Russian government to study the Chinese language on the spot in order then to teach Chinese at the university. He did not want to be alone in China and married a girl who had formerly been a pupil of his and had been interested in languages. He went by ship from Vladivostok first to Japan. His wife already deceived him upon the ship with an officer. Then she died in China of yellow fever. He reproached himself that he had caused her death because he had given her too much champagne. His first wife had been in correspondence with a German woman. They exchanged letters in order to perfect themselves in this way each in the foreign language. (It was still before the war.) After his wife's death he finished his studies in China and went to Germany to continue them in Berlin and to marry his wife's unknown correspondent, with whom he himself had entered into an exchange of letters. He actually accomplished this marriage after overcoming severe resistances. Both then went to Russia. There the events took place which I will reproduce in the patient's own words. At the end of the analysis George — so we will name him — delivered me his notes, which I will reproduce here literally that we may understand his case. Dear Dr. Stekel: My analysis is coming to an end. I willingly pass on to you, after our seven months' work, the following notes. You are at liberty to make use of this manuscript in whole or in part. I know that your work is for the welfare of mankind and gladly con- tribute my bit to your life work. I am a Russian by birth and university professor of modern languages and Sanskrit. I am now fifty-two years old, married, without children. I lost my father when I was eight years old. He was a musician and had besides a small shop, which my mother conducted. He died at a hospital for the insane of multiple sclerosis. My mother hanged herself when I was engaged in my studies in China. I was thirty-two years old at that time. I was the oldest of five brothers and sisters, four boys and one girl. I SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF- ACCUSATION 163 seem to have had a very bad inheritance. My oldest brother, a poet and waiter (a strange combination!), showed repeated signs of paranoia and was three times interned in an asylum. The next brother, an advocate, died as the result of a streptococcus infection after an injection with a Pravaz syringe. (The needle must have been unclean. His murderer was our family physician!) This brother was not at all nervous ; at any rate, he was the healthiest member of our family. The third brother, a highly qualified worker in metal, had been condemned twice for exhibitionistic acts, was also under observation for some time in a psychiatric clinic. My sister is married to an orchestra conductor and has two healthy boys, whom she has never beaten and never intimidated with threats. Three of her children died of intercurrent diseases. I had been treated before I came to you by two analysts, who had had very little experience. Their knowledge came from the reading of analytic works. Thus two years ago I put myself under analytic treatment by Mr. N. My most important symptom was an unconquerable fear that my students might hiss me out ; they might play all kinds of monkey tricks (miaowing, crowing, and such things). My condition grew worse during the treatment. One day I re- ceived an anonymous letter which bristled with vulgar, insulting words. They belonged chiefly in the category of urinary and anal sexuality (Lick me ... I will p ... on you . . . you whore's son . . . you vulgar beast . . . your standpoint will soon be made clear to you. . . . You want to be a professor? You are a com- mon s ... in your trousers ... I). This letter was without a stamp ; it was stuck in the small letter box which was affixed to my institute. One may imagine my excitement. Anna, my wife, was of the opinion that it could only be a trick of the boys. The writing was disguised. It was all in large printed letters. I believed it could only have been one of my pupils. My suspi- cion was directed toward a strapping fellow whom I already hated because he was the largest and strongest of my students, while I unfortunately am weak, sickly, and small in size, which has always increased my sense of inferiority. After a few days a second letter came, later a third, and a fourth. I went to the rector and demanded a thorough investi- gation. I turned to the police, even hired my own detective. While my letter box was being watched day and night, the daily papers received a flood of insulting letters which made my person i64 SADISM AND MASOCHISM the target for derision and slander. They were all written in large Latin characters, but in the Russian language. Protest was raised that a man like me should be a university professor. I was imbecile as a result of secret sexual excesses, I neither had the ability nor was I worthy to be a teacher of youth. I now proceeded to a counterattack. I accused the student, had him brought before the rector, and told him to his face that he was the writer of the anonymous letters. He stubbornly denied it. An expert in graphology believed he had discovered some sim- ilarities with his writing, but was unable to reach any certain con- clusion. The investigation was without result, but I was so excited that I had to petition for a leave of absence, which was granted me. I began myself to study graphology. Gradually the terrible knowledge dawned upon me that I had written the letters myself. It was a mystery to me why I had done it. The youth whom I had accused pleased me physically in an extraordinary degree. I have learned only with you that homosexual motives must have played a part, so much the more likely as there were many allusions to homosexuality in the anonymous obscene letters ("You cold brother, you," and so on). I might add to this that in the first analysis I repeatedly played the part of an insane person and was often on the border of in- sanity. My wife received a basket of eggs from a friend in the country. I would not let her use the eggs, for I thought they had been poisoned. A friend at the club drew a medicine bottle from his pocket and was going to take a spoonful. I screamed at him: "Do not drink it ! The medicine is poisonous ! There is only one person here who is immune toward poisons — and that is George.'* Thereupon I drank the entire bottle at one draft. I was enthusiastic over analysis. The analyst had discovered my CEdipus complex, of which I will speak later. I wanted now to ex- plain everything by the CEdipus complex. But even at that time the castration complex seemed to have played a great role. The threat of castration had been made also in one of the pamphlets (**Wait, you dog, you — you will have your . . . and your . . . cutoff! Such a cur should be a castrate !"). This threat was in the last of the anonymous letters. The letter threw me into an agony of fear. The student in question was now a terror to me by SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 165 night and day. In my agitated fantasy I would see him climbing through the window and castrating me with a large knife. The thought never came to me that I might defend myself. Resistance seemed to be entirely excluded. I did not learn until I came to you that I wanted to play the part of woman toward this fellow. I retired to solitude in the country. Anna had to pass through a severe time with me and fought like a heroine against the insanity which was coming upon me. Then I went to another analyst, who devoted many hours of the day to me and held me completely under his spell. I was his willing tool and saw a god in him. I read nothing but analytic books. Naturally, your works came also into my hand. The war was over. I possessed some trinkets which, with some other valuables of my own, I sold and came to you seeking a cure. Here I first learned to know myself com- pletely, and I submit the following notes to you out of gratitude : MY FATHER My father was my ideal. All fathers are at first the ideal of their children. What was my greatest satisfaction? To march by the side of my tall, erect father and stretch myself as much as possible and then to dream that I was already as tall as he : we were wandering shoulder to shoulder and chatting of the im- portant events of the world and discussing great universal prob- lems. In my dreams he seemed cool and unapproachable despite my great yearning to love him and confide in him in every respect. I should like to have told him that I had always been loyal to him and that my mother had done him injustice when she complained of his cruelty. I always said to myself : "Quarreling arises from fault on both sides. The one party cannot always be solely to blame." In fact! I often protested to my mother and felt like a small hero if I defended my absent father when he could not speak for himself. The last affectionate look which he cast upon his children when he was taken away to the asylum remained with me as an imperishable memory, a look of mingled pity and reproach. I have wished for his death. But when, like a brave soldier, he spoke a kind word (with the bearing of a heroic war- rior, unbowed by fate), when I saw him before me overcome, cast down and yet courageous, my scorn vanished. Since that time I have thought every authority which has stood over me, teacher, commander, rector, priest, and analyst, should share his lot so that I could have compassion upon them and show them my condescen- i66 SADISM AND MASOCHISM sion and magnanimity — but only after their downfall ! Thus I feel toward the German emperor, of whom I dreamed last night. I could now be gracious to him and say to him that I have always recognized his great talent and his surpassing power. Now that he is deprived of his strength (castrated?) I could not be so base as to triumph over him, but I should like to show him how generous I can be. I know that I felt myself partly responsible for my father's internment. Mother and I discussed together what protective measures we should take. It was much better to know him as mentally diseased in an asylum for the insane than to bear the shame of his being put in prison for crime. At any rate he was a sick man, and one could regard his illness as an excuse for his frightful cruelty. Away with him ! Anywhere where he could no longer torment the mother and children ! That was the problem. It was done under the pressure of circumstances, but I felt later torturing stings of conscience, as if I had been the only one to blame. He always wanted to subdue me and break my will. My mother could not permit it. She stood between him and me — often at the risk of her life. He was fearful in his rage. After his departure I wanted to take a position and become the head of the family. This was my fantasy. It happened somewhat differently. Mother packed up all her possessions and went to live with her parents, far away in another corner of Russia. Let- ters came from the asylum from my father which angered my mother. He frequently mentioned that he would like to see her again. But my mother hated him and would not hear of it. My pity, my stings of conscience, my fear, were mingled with a hatred instilled by her. But I had to speak a word for him now and then: "I am sorry for the poor man! He could not do other- wise ! And are you not a bit at fault ?" Then she would turn her anger upon me. It seemed that I loved him more than my mother. The other children all stood with her. I was alone, and I felt like Daniel in the lions' den, between wild beasts who would gladly have torn my father to pieces. Riddles of the soul ! As long as he stood threateningly over me, I, too, could have rent him in pieces. It now occurs to me that I often had the burning desire to play with his genitals. To take the large phallus in my hand and also to caress the enormous testicles, which, so soft and mobile, rolled hither and thither. My father's genitals were to me something powerful, wonderful, and made more impression upon me than the little I could find out about my mother. I had always SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 167 been impressed by the *'he" in man and animal. If I could not be a man like "him/' at least he must stand beside me and support me with his manhood. I also expect assistance from Dr. Stekel, and if I may accompany him upon his walk, which, alas, is seldom the case, I have the same feeling as when, a tiny fellow, I moved along proudly at my father's side. I am convinced that my father looked askance at the demonstra- tions of tenderness which I stole from my mother. I was always in fear that he might surprise us at our scenes of affection, 1 often wept tc excite her pity. She took me to her breast and rocked me to sleep. I do not remember that my father ever took me upon his knee. Probably he did do it. I have a faint recol- lection of running my small fingers through his sparse beard, of pulling it, and the head moving from one side to the other. Then he bites my hands and my ears, while his beard tickles my face. I remember very well his taking me to the closet because I was suffering from constipation and he wanted to get me to move the bowels. When I sat on his lap, I did not want to get up and could have no movement. For this reason I am still constipated when on the train, if I sit upon the soft plush chairs. Father taught me how to press so that the stool would come. He did this several times. I liked it very much, until one day he told me that I was big now and could do it alone. I know that I often complained to my mother in later years of my constipation. Evidently I would have had her help me as if I had been still a little child. I cannot remember whether she ever did assist me. She certainly gave me much good instruction how to overcome the difficulty. Memories of her enemas are very clear. I see her as she greased the syringe with vaseline, and I still feel how it hurt when she was unskillful. She also used her finger to empty the rectum. Here the patient's notes concerning his father end. They turn to the mother. But they break off. He spoke much more of his mother in the analysis than of his father. The father v^as later morose and taciturn. He never spoke a word with his children. Just once he took his fiddle and played a lively tune. The children were allowed to dance. The scene is un- forgettable to the patient. He often imagines it. It was per- haps the happiest moment of his life. Once he saw his father spring out of bed and chastise a brother. His powerful genitals moved back and forth. That greatly impressed him. i68 SADISM AND MASOCHISM He suffers a depressing feeling of inferiority in regard to his own member. His wife is anaesthetic and he believes that he cannot satisfy her. He sees in the smallness of his organ the reason why his first wife deceived him. He envies every strong man his member (penis envy). If he were a woman, he would not have to worry about the size of his organ. His ideal would be a very small woman with a small, narrow genital. It is his distress that his wife is large and strong and, according to his idea, needs a complete man. He says very little about his mother in his notes. The analysis brought to light a great deal of material regarding the incest complex. He was the acknowledged favorite of his mother and for a long time slept in bed with her. She often comforted him as to the smallness of his genitals and thought they were all right. He was eighteen when she made the re- mark that as far as their genitals were concerned they would make a good pair. She was narrowly formed, and he had the right size. He thought a great deal of her words, but did not dare to avail himself of the invitation. This appeal played a great role in his fantasies. Still another scene stands before his eyes. It was a year later, and he was traveling with his mother. They had to spend the night in the same bed. He remembers nothing of the occurrences of this night. We know this patient's capacity for repression. I will give one more striking example of his ability to forget things which he wanted to forget. I will cite here but one example. I re- ceived from America a long letter of acknowledgment from a former patient. It was rather illegibly written. The patient had to help me decipher the handwriting. (He knew English very well; was master of many languages.) He gave me a long lecture upon the differences in the EngHsh and American styles. The next day I came to speak of the letter in connection with a dream. He had no longer any idea that he had trans- lated and discussed a letter. One passage had touched him unpleasantly and for that reason the entire letter was forgotten. This passage concerned an unhappy love affair. We shall un- derstand later why he wanted to forget it and the whole letter. SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 169 The memory fails from the moment he lay down in bed with the mother. The mother was opposed to his first marriage. He became engaged and married without asking her. When he was in China she described to him in a letter her difficult situation. He would have been able to support her, but he was resentful toward her because of her opposition and sent a ridiculously small amount, and this only after two weeks. In the mean- time occurred his mother's suicide, which he apparently bore calmly, but which was a heavy burden on his conscience. He was outwardly an atheist, inwardly very religious. His notes give exhaustive information concerning this. MY RELATION TO RELIGION I was always dominated by the idea that priests are hypo- crites as regards sexuality. My mother planted these ideas in me. My father, too, was a man free in his religion ; he had a sort of pantheism and did not believe in eternal punishment. He believed that we would doubtless be punished, but certainly saved later. My mother did not trouble herself much about her faith. But once she heard a traveling preacher, came home, fell into violent weeping, and thought she had not led us in the right way. We prayed in common at meals and before going to bed, and I prom- ised to read every day in the holy Scriptures until I had read them through. I did this faithfully. I prayed every evening: "Before I lay me down to sleep — I pray that I Thy path may keep ; — If I should die before I wake, — Oh, bless me, Lord, for Thy dear sake. — Jesus Christ will set me free, — Hell's evil hand shall not hold me." Then I prayed for the spiritual welfare of my whole family. I faithfully said my prayers every evening. But then I abbreviated them and many times forgot them, until at > thirty years of age I finally stopped. About this time I began to smoke. I always felt a sense of guilt on this account. The old church hymns often come to my mind before I go to sleep. My mind seems to have been always praying, even when thinking of my first innocent love. My prayers were not sincere. I prayed for my brothers' lives and inwardly wished for their death. I wanted to be the only one in the family who achieved anything great SADISM AND MASOCHISM and whom the mother warmly loved. I have not yet related the history of my unhappy love. I only was to blame that our hopes were not realized. But I had the secret belief that we should meet in another world. Karola was the name of the girl, of whom I made a saint that I could worship. She became the object of a religious ceremonial. I erected in my heart a sacred shrine to her. . . . She was my eternal secret. I never sullied her image with sexual desires. I could have possessed her. I never touched her. I reserved her virgin body for our bridal night, so that we might both drink the new wine of virgin love from golden beakers — without shame, without reproach. The long period of self- denial should enhance the joy of possession. Hymen's bond should unite us and give us the right to an ecstasy of love such as only the wildest fantasy can picture. I have always envied priests that penitent Magdalenes have told them of their sins. Other motives, too, gave my envy no rest. Priests may eat and drink well. I was envious of their beautiful, long black cloak. Everything that the priest does is sacred and sanctioned by the Church. Children to whom he gives a father's care are sacred. How I have wished to be a preacher and to scourge the community from their sexuality through portrayal of their sins! I would have made of my pious lambs inmates of a harem in my fantasy. The feeling of being able to watch over and control the sexual life of my flock, and particularly of the women, was extraordinarily colored with pleasure. Come to me, all ye unsatisfied little women and I will give you rest : the rest of peace and of the poise which comes after yielding oneself and after the orgasm, so that one could die because one feels in a moment all the bliss for which one has pined in vain. But the love that Jesus taught us was something purified and conceivable only to the spirit which has overcome obscene earthly love. The highest love is that toward God, and how could that ^ be sexual? Sexual love is vulgar — I think of what the boys have told me and what they did at school. It was frightful. They threw us to the ground, opened our trousers, and looked at our member. How they boasted that they had thrown the girls to the ground! If I had raped the teacher, I should have been put in prison. Drinking, smoking, card playing, and going with harlots — these are the sins. All earthly pleasures must be sins. The fiddle is the instrument of the devil; it leads to sin. First the girls dance, and then feverish with desire they lie down in the grass with their best-beloved. How often have I run away from church and SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 171 gone with the other boys to the woods ! But the itinerant preach- ers, these old sinners, threatened us with fire and brimstone. We would go straight to hell. Then I was terrified and exerted myself to go regularly to church. (I recall dreams in which the preacher pointed his finger at me and threatened me with an evil end if I did not find the right way. I wanted to flee from the church and every time was brought back to the place, and the preacher's finger was directed toward me, until I awoke bathed in perspiration. Such dreams came also in the last year.) Going to church and orgies were closely associated in my childhood. I remember another itinerant preacher, who pictured the fearful consequences of drunkenness and painted in glaring colors his own sad drunkard's life. I thought to myself that his former life of sin was certainly more attractive than the calling to preach to old hens and masturbating callow youths, telling them that they should renounce all the joy of life and prepare themselves for heavenly bliss. But these sermons were forgotten at the wonderful fairs, the bright points in my life. Grandfather had a booth where he sold gingerbread, sweets, and tobacco. He had also a small panorama where I could see scenes from the Turkish war. I was the crier and considered myself of no slight importance. There were many puzzling things about the fair ; my curiosity was lively and could not always be satisfied. (The fair constitutes in many dreams the scene in which the events take place. Eight to fourteen years old during the time of the fairs.) About the eleventh year I began to speculate about the purpose of life, about death, and the beyond. For a long time the word "death" threw me into the most fearful excitement. I begged Mother not to speak of it. She respected my wish. She knew that I was a nervous child and did everything she could to enliven me and keep me occupied. Often when I was working in the field I was seized with the fear that the world might go to ruin. That would be the Judgment Day. Destruction of the world ! My sense of guilt had foundation. I had once put verdigris in the milk in order to kill my brother; at another time had almost thrust out his eye. It was no accident, as I pretended ; it was done pur- posely ! Here memories make themselves felt which I cannot bring up. Resistances. The fear of death appeared at a time when I mortally hated my brother. About this time, the traveling preachers made a fearful impression upon me. Another experience made me quake. I was working in the field. SADISM AND MASOCHISM Suddenly my mother uttered a cry that would freeze one's marrow. She had been working in the straw and had thrust her fingers upon a snake. It was dreadful to watch my mother shaving my father (eight). I must have had the wish that she would make a clumsy movement and cut his throat. I asked her if she were not afraid to shave my father. Father always slept with his revolver under his pillow. He threatened that fie would shoot any burglar. I have an unclear recollection that he also threatened Mother with the revolver. I was afraid of his razor and his revolver and trem- bled at the thought that he might shoot Mother. I know that one day Mother was fumbling in a drawer. Then a friend of Father's came and after a warm dispute took the revolver away with him. I have carried a revolver myself only for a short time, and was always afraid it might go off and I might shoot some one. I once spent a night with a Japanese girl. She had, like all Japanese women, a small vagina and I fitted her very well. But I had the fear that Chinese and especially her Chinese lover would threaten me. In the morning some men went by my house cursing loudly. I sprang out of bed and fired some shots into the air through the open door of the outer room. My Chinese servant, who was as faithful as a dog, rushed yelling into the room. I thought I had wounded him. But he had screamed only from fear. I was afraid later that the revolver might discharge itself and kill me. I tried it in a boat, as a dolphin appeared. Three times the weapon failed ; then it went off and hit the noble thing, which, wounded, danced about the boat for a time until it disappeared. I reproached myself for this. It was the last time that I ever used this revolver. After my wife died I was in despair. My friend P. hid my revolver. I have never seen it since. P. feared I might commit suicide. I doubt that I would have done it. For my love of life and the feel- ing of freedom were stronger than my consciousness of guilt. I returned home to Russia. I bought a new revolver and shot at dogs which barked at the moon and disturbed my sleep. There may have been twenty of them. . . . One was merely hit in the spinal cord. I found him the next morning before my house paralyzed and I charged myself with cruelty. Perhaps I identified myself with the animal. (He barked at the moon in an ill humor, as I do.) I also shot rats if they came into my room or ran across the yard. Once I killed a bear, cut out its claws, roasted it over an improvised fire of coals, and ate it. I brought a part of my booty home. Friends came and I was invited to a bear roast. SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 173 I was afraid it might have been poisoned ; I did not eat a bit of it, and pretended I was unwell. Back, however, to religion. My mother vacillated between faith and unbelief. She did not bring me up to believe, but made use of religion when she saw a vice or the beginning of one in me and preached to me like a regular priest, of morality, righteousness, and the like. My faith in her was considerably shaken through certain small things. I was jealous when she decked herself out to visit a friend of our family. Why did she dress herself so that her breasts showed through her thin blouse? I was jealous and suspected the sexual. Then an important experience. She had promised me a ruble if I would wash the dishes for a month. I did it very faithfully. When the first of the month came, she put oflf paying me. I never received the ruble, and I have never been able to forgive nor to forget even to the present day that she deceived me. I lost faith in her word at that time. Perhaps that was the reason that I did not send her money from China when she asked for it. Then I saw how in the shop she would so treat spoiled, rancid butter with salt and other ingredients that she could sell the mixture as fresh country butter. I always have this picture before me, and it has disturbed my belief in my mother's sincerity and the honesty of people in general. Neither could I understand how she could assure me that I was her favorite child, while she often emphatically stated to my brothers and sisters that she loved all her children equally. Since that time, justice and equal right for all have become my fixed idea. Nor did I believe in her purity. Once after my father's death she had a debt to pay. She went to a neighboring city and borrowed 100 rubles from an advocate. This money she was never asked to repay. She said she had signed a note for it. I doubted this and was of the opin- ion that my mother had sold herself for the money. . . . I used often to wonder how my mother had enjoyed life before her marriage. Why was father so unhappy? Even before analysis I interpreted her relapses into a fanatic religious belief as the result of an evil conscience. These home devotions were a torture to me, and I was glad when they were gradually given up. My intimate friend at that time was a priest's son. His father was an ascetic, but his mother had an evil reputation. She often teased me and said I would be a good tradesman. The son would make fun of religion and tell me the most incredible things regarding his relations to country girls, and the like. At first I wondered that the son of a priest could be such a sinner, but then I listened 174 SADISM AND MASOCHISM with pleasure to his filthy stories. Later my ascetic tendencies came again and again to the fore. Drinking is the vice of our people. I began to drink early; after being drunk I would sol- emnly vow never to drink another drop nor to smoke any more ; I would backslide and then renew my attempts to live in total ab- stinence. A religious psychosis finally developed, when I arrived at the years of puberty. Death, hell, the devil, eternity, the Last Judg- ment, were objects of my brooding speculation. I deserved death. But I wished death to so many others! For example, I was afraid of the barber. He might lose his reason and cut my throat. Spirits of those whom I had slain in my fantasy appeared in my dreams at night and in waking hallucinations. I must con- fess that I have carried on homosexual play with my brother F. I was the seducer. Or was he? But I (fifteen) envied him his larger penis and wanted to emasculate him. I killed his soul! Now I could wish that he would wrestle with me and overcome me. Then I should know that he is a man. But he is crucified upon the cross of parapathy. It is a frightful thought to have emasculated one's own brother. Last night in my dream I cas- trated Dr. Stekel. I should like to emasculate all rivals who are superior to me in any way. Only then would I be merciful to them when they were in my power. They shall no longer be men who with deep, power- ful, imposing voices deceive women by means of wooing words of love, words with which they prove themselves to the women as whole men. I want to be the only man in the world, the only one who has the right to emasculate. I would gladly deprive all men of their manhood, so that the women would have no one but me to whom to go. That is what I am like within! Could any one believe that I actually wanted to be a priest? Mother often told me that I had fine white hands like a parish priest. Genuine religious feeling was implanted in me by my grandparents. With them there were many sermons and long prayers, and I had to go with them to church. I know that even now I am pious in my inner nature. I brought my Bible with me when I came to Vienna, but I have never once taken it in my hand. Mother corrupted my childish faith. She used to say that she would not leave her daughter alone five minutes with a parish priest. Then again she would believe in the priests. This is the distraught person I have become. . . . SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 175 MY SEXUAL LIFE How can I find the way that leads out of this labyrinth of my sexual fantasies ? How bridle my ambition, which is closely bound with the sexuality? It is my desire to climb to the highest level of aristocracy or plutocracy. I should like to have my palace, my motor car, receive rich patients and hear the confession of their sexual orgies. I want to destroy all my opponents. I should like to be Lenin and should like to condemn everybody to death. Of¥ with their heads i I am cruel. I was cruel even as a child. I tortured insects before I killed them. I tore the wings from flies, pierced butter- flies with a needle, and fastened them alive upon the walls. I wanted to catch snakes and tear off their heads as the other boys did, but I feared they would bite me. I tweaked the cats' tails until they cried out with pain and writhed in my grasp. I would torment animals in a cage. If I tortured any animal to death, it fascinated me to watch how long it could live. My sport with earthworms was to cut them in pieces, smaller and smaller until they no longer moved. Or I would stick them with needles until they died. I would tear one or two wings and legs from an insect and take delight in watching the maimed creature trying to get away. I caught wasps, tore out their sting or laid them upon hot irons ; I picked out their sting and pulled off their heads. I often felt a superstitious fear of ladybugs ["Mary beetles"]. One would turn its head and look me in the eyes as if to say : **I am a harmless woman. My name is Mary. Do not touch me or do me any harm. I have a pure, chaste soul. You must spare me !'* The eyes accused me and I shuddered. The ticking of the death beetle terrified me. Some one had told me its ticking meant death. I always feared that I might fall asleep and never waken. I might die and go to hell. I did not go to sleep unless my mother was in the room. I love to fight. Biting and scratching give me more pleasure than kissing and stroking. I tormented my brothers horribly as long as they were too small to offer resistance. I pinched them and liked to push them out of bed with my buttocks. It gave me the greatest satisfaction when they cried. Then I would bid them not tell Mother or I would revenge myself fearfully. And they never dared tell anything. I was often afraid that they would betray something to Mother. I knew that she would give me a terrible beating. I do not like to think how brutal I was with 176 SADISM AND MASOCHISM my brothers. But cruelty is a necessity with me. It is a part of my nature. This is the wild, biting, and raging beast in me! If beautiful eyes will not smile upon me, I want to scratch them out. I am like a cat; my cruelty is deep and hidden. No one knows what it will do the next moment. According to my mood, I may love or torture, and no one knows why I am thus or so. Cat, dog, and man are a sort of trinity to me. I love to watch the fight between dog and cat. The cat climbs the tree and spits and snarls at the dog, which cannot climb after her. I also liked to cut up live fish and observe the beating of the heart. Vivisection was a great and supreme pleasure. I ration- alized my cruelty as a child : the small animals feel no pain ; as a grown-up I made myself believe the scientific end justifies the means. I might consider as a remnant of my cruelty the habit I have of scratching myself often until I bleed. I did everything I could think of to my brothers. I would pull their ears, and I believe that the misshapen ears of one of my brothers are due to my mistreatment. But I can also report masochistic pleasure. It gratified me when grown girls held me as a little boy, swinging me by my ears over the ground, one on each side, which my com- rades admired as a great deed. I can only vaguely remember these scenes (eight to nine). I also found my delight in tormenting girls, squeezing, pinching, and tweaking them until they were sub- missive. I should have liked to tame wild savage beasts of women and make them my slaves. Just as my father did with my mother. He once threw her to the floor and kneeled upon her. She was at his mercy. Cruelty gives the greatest pleasure in the sexual life. See how the cock works at the hen with its beak, when it mounts the hen ! Or how the stallion in heat belabors the mare with his hoofs ! Or the bull ! Observe once how cats fight to secure the greatest en- joyment from their passion! Does the cat want to push away her partner, the hook-shaped penis is thrust forcibly into her vagina as if it would tear it asunder. Think of that, you old woman! If you do not give yourself willingly, I will rend you by force. I think of the bull's spike. It is sharp and long, like a fine-pointed pencil. If the cow is not willing and turns her vagina hither and thither instead of opening it, he sticks it where he pleases. He may tear open the belly and kill the cow. Therefore yield, you stubborn women ! It will be better for you not to struggle but to submit to your fate! Yield or die: if you scorn love, you must feel its pains. SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 177 My mother once said of a neighbor that she was not satisfied with the vinegar she had bought. My father flared up and cried : *'I will make vinegar of her !" This outcry still rings in my ears when I see a woman who offers resistance. I will make vinegar of her ! I will finish her ! The next time she will be as gentle as a dove ! I want to torture all women whom I desire and who do not take notice of me! God preserve them from my fury if they come in my way ! Perhaps I would not torture them, only frighten them and show what I might be capable of. Love me or you will suffer ! You, too, Dr. Stekel, defend yourself against my re- venge ! Love me or you will suffer ! "And if you'll not my brother be. Til break your skull in, don't you see !" My fantasies with onanism often have to do with torture. My orgasm is increased if I have a sort of pain in the foreskin. This is the everlasting contrast between pleasure and pain. I am proud that the pleasure outweighs every pain which accompanies the act. Here sadism and masochism are united in me. I want to torture and be tortured. The joy in being tortured is secondary. It arises from wanting to torture. A thousand small symbolic actions reveal to me my latent sadism. I catch myself tearing a leaf from a tree and biting it into small pieces. I likewise tear every piece of paper as small as possible. I make of the paper a living being and imagine that the paper suffers pain. Everything wants to remain whole and does not want to be rent asunder. The quartering and wheels, all the refined cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition, as I have seen them in pictures, fascinate me mightily. I have sought in vain for a book which would give me an ex- haustive view of the torture chambers of the Inquisition. I have repeatedly spoken of the inquisition of the government when we were entangled in the war. If I cannot torture people physically, I will try to do it psychically. I can harass them mentally and torture them so that they groan and writhe with agony. I would grind and sharpen them through the terrors of the soul and let them blanch and quake as with the anguish of death, if I could tear the covering from their filthy and ugly souls. How I envy Dr. Stekel that he is an analyst. I believe he is too good for this call- ing. A true analyst must be a sadist. Maybe the most of them are sadists and are glad when they can keep their victims in the screw vice of the transference. An analyst pleases me better than the massacring Turk with his bloody curved sword in his angry gleam- ing teeth, who rushes upon his victim with the lust of the robber 178 SADISM AND MASOCHISM and murderer. My own delight is the torture of souls. Be good to me or you will come to feel my power ! I am now gentle with all animals. If I should kill a flea, I would do it quickly so that the poor creature should not suffer. I never intentionally tread upon a beetle when I am walking. I am glad there are so many automobiles, for I cannot bear to see a horse drawing a heavy load. I at once identify myself with the poor beast, with every suffering animal. Animal stories are my passion. If I see a rough driver beating his poor old horse, I could take the whip from his hand and beat him as I saw him striking his beast. And I have been as cruel myself ! Once I built a fire on the back of a turtle and watched the creature running round helpless. Then I thrust a stick into its inwards and observed its death struggle. I also tortured my mother with refined cruelty. It was after the last examination at the university. I came home sorrowful and depressed and wept. She asked me how the exam- ination had turned out. I gave her no answer. I contemplated her mental distress, for I surmised that she believed the worst. Then I uttered a cry of anguish and told her that I had failed. Oh, how she wept and how unhappy she was ! I exulted in her misery be- cause I could thereby measure her love to me. I allowed her to suffer for a long time and then told her the truth : I had passed my examinations brilliantly. First to behold her agony, her despair, her gloom, and then the delightful contrast of her joy over my distinction, that was a gratification that I could have paid for with years of my life ! ! ! I love contrasts. I am a fanatic as regards contrast. It filled me with enthusiasm when grandfather thrust the glowing iron into the cold water, so that it hissed loudly, steamed and roared. The glowing iron paid for its defiance ; it had to bend to the water. I could wish that a woman would spit upon me in hatred while I held her fast, clasped her with arms of iron, overpowered her, and did to her what I would. I should like to overcome men and castrate them, crush their testicles so that they would be sterile. I have done this mentally to one brother. The other would not submit. He had to die, because I killed him through the omnip- otence of thought. I am suspicious, for I know myself too well. If any one smiles at me in a friendly way, I conceive that there is poison behind the kindliness. If I smile at others I am afraid that they will detect my internal hate, which lurks behind my smile. I approach them, look into their eyes, play with their hands, while I should like to SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 179 scratch their eyes out. I imagine I am a cock and can pick out their eyes with my sharp beak. Or I am a bull and thrust my horns into their bellies, so that the bloody entrails gush out ! I am an animal! Thus I played with my brothers and uttered animal cries. I struck them with my fists and roared. Or I bit and barked. I should now like to be a goat and push after the women and cry "Meek, meek !" I often played this with my sister. God ! What hypocrites men are ! I am here in a pension and meet many people. I try to win every one, flatter everybody, and speak friendly words ; I make compliments, I admire, I am cour- teous. I subject them to me through my kindness. I tame them and they are slaves to my friendliness. But behind this mask is concealed my boundless will to power. Sometimes the cruelty breaks through. I give a friendly thump, but it is so brutally done that it causes pain. I did this yesterday walking with Dr. Stekel, when he began to speak of my sister. That was unpleasant to me. He has come upon things which I have hidden from him and from myself. I gave him a thrust out of joy at the discovery. He at once recognized the true motive and declared that I might never go walking with him again if I touched him. He knows too much of my true motives. EARLY SEXUAL LIFE AND FANTASIES My earliest childhood is hidden in the mists. There are very many experiences which float before me like an "as if." I can not clearly grasp them. Two figures engage my attention : our maidservant, Marescha, and my sister Anita. Marescha was an ugly, dirty slut, but a smart thing. I suspected the father of having relations with her. We also had a sort of relationship ; everything is obscure and unclear. I only know that I was always the passive member. Marescha seems to have taken the initiative. I see myself lying between her legs. I feel her playing with me underneath. I approach her vulva with my tongue. The strong odor stupefies me. I am experiencing a strong aflfect while I write this, and I am trembling over my whole body. I want to repress something. Could this unkempt, filthy woman attract me? Why not? Dirt has always fascinated me. I am a mysophiliac and a pronounced anal sexualist. I often have an itching in the anus and have to scratch myself. I like best to bore with my finger in the anus. I am only ashamed to do it. I also bore around my nose and observe the mucus with interest. I delight in the i8o SADISM AND MASOCHISM smell of old closets. I was always interested as a child in who had been to the closet before me. I could make diagnoses from the form of the stool. Once there was an enormous diarrheal dis- charge, which disquieted me. How could I discover the author of it ? From whom came the great heap ? This was an achievement ! Who could have believed it possible that a tiny female could have laid such a giant egg? If I void a large mass of feces on a cold day, I feel that I have given off a part of my inner warmth, and a shudder of sadness goes through my body. If I cannot be in the mother's warm body, I want at least to keep my heat for myself. I was looking one time at a photograph of myself : I said to myself, "You look as if you had befouled yourself !" Yes — I am a mysophiliac. In my fantasy I steal about places where excrement, filth, and rotten things are, where there is foul odor. I also wear my linen until it stinks and is dreadfully dirty. I excuse myself in my own eyes that clothing becomes soiled so quickly. I rationalize that there is no good toilet paper. But I know that I seek the odor of feces and therefore do not properly clean myself. In my dreams I am even a coprophagist. Back to Marescha ! Why the devil do I avoid the theme ? Well, now — she was dirty, but her hinder parts and her mons Veneris were ''all right." She had soft hands. What did I do between her legs? I played with my little fingers, went into her "mouse hole," and she seems to have had great satisfaction from it. We had a magnetic attraction for each other. And we had no other wish than to carry on forbidden play together. She was a woman and still young. And I felt at that time neither fear nor inhibition. I know now why I really want that one thing, to have women take my member in their hand and play with me. I do not want anything else. Shall that be a satisfaction, first to have to take the trouble to find where the opening is and then overcome the diffi- culties of penetration? How sweet, on the contrary, if the tender velvety hand grasps you and brings you to the orgasm without your having to make any effort! The whole body quivers with ecstasies which no poet can describe. My entire sexual life is based upon these dark, misty recollections, the repetition of which I crave. I do not care for naked women. It is a much greater satisfac- tion to lift a woman's skirt and to discover how the leg grows more and more fully rounded the higher one goes. Then the dark, warm, snug, downy mouse's nest . . . with its warm and ruttish SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION i8i slime within. The hand rises higher and higher. I touch every- thing, I smell everything, even the sweetish-sour odor which stupe- fies me. I see myself between Marescha's legs ; I smell her anus. • . • I lick. • • • The devil ! All memories are hazy. Nothing comes clearly. Everything is a "perhaps." I now get a scene. She is playing with the penis and testicles and produces for me the first erection. I smell . . . and now I know why I am disgusted with my wife's odor. The disgust has now entirely disappeared. It was re- pression. I know now how easily disgust changes to desire. I could now . . . In my fantasy I even swallow my own semen. Why have 1 loathed oysters? I know now what lies behind the loathing. (There follow tedious fantasies of cunnilingus and anilingus, which I cannot reproduce even in a scientific work.) Now I know why Marie in the pension where I lived first excited me so greatly sexually. Was she unwashed? So much the better. I do not want her clean. If everything is washed away, there re- mains no fragrance and no sweetness. I hope she will not bathe. It was this which drew me so strongly to the filthy Chinese women. / protest on the other hand that men and women bathe too frequently ! It takes away something from their personality. They say you have got to eat a peck of dirt before you die, any- way. Of course you never believe you have eaten the full allow- ance until the last moment of your life. There should always be a certain amount of good clean dirt, just as there should be a bit of garlic rubbed into the cooking, while a good deal would be dis- gusting. I am beginning to see why I have such a disgust for a bit of black or a spot of any kind in my food. My poison complex is mixed up with cunnilingus and fellatio in this way : To believe I can get poisoned by the penis or cunnus is a defense measure or a protection against my impulse to do so. Fear of venereal diseases is a perfectly good reason, of course, in reality. But why should I be any more afraid of exploring with my tongue the dark luscious recesses of her cunnus than those of her mouth, as the other? I am eager to have the time pass and yet eager to go on in these delicious fantasies. Marescha was a big erotic in- fluence right at the beginning. My attitude to Marescha is a double one. She is to me both mother and Marescha. She mothers me, is of uncertain history, and is doubtless cunnilingable, if you will allow me to add a new word to the already large pornographic vocabulary to which I have introduced you. I believe I would i82 SADISM AND MASOCHISM have been a good teacher of a language-pornography. But this will do for to-day. I hope I can be decent to-day while getting over this infantile debauch with Marescha. Here the memories break off, still saying nothing about the most important experiences, passing over them in silence. We will soon come back to this and see that it has to do with another memory which forces itself upon him and which he does not want to make conscious. We will go on with the pub- lication of his notes, as follows : FIVE UNPLEASANT EXPERIENCES 1. Last year in K. I invited my English class to go with me to see an exhibition of modern pictures. I dismissed my audience and went to the gallery. I was very much chagrined that none of my pupils appeared. I was afraid then of those who attended my lectures. I know now that some of them excited me homosexually. I could not call a single student by name, and I offended a woman student who was a bugbear to me because I addressed her by the name of the young man who was known as her friend. At the end I lost every bit of assurance and believed that the pupils were making sport of me. I was happy when I did not have to go to the lecture. 2. My mother laughed at me when I tried to put the great logs of wood in the yard in order. They were too heavy for me. I looked round once and caught my mother smiling. Since that time I have been afraid that any one might laugh at me. When people are laughing in a restaurant or on the street, my first thought is that they are making fun of me. 3. I was always fearful that my clothing was somehow in dis- order or that I was improperly clothed. I had once in Paris pur- chased a seat for Samson and Delilah and did not know that at the Paris opera one had to wear a dinner or frock coat in the parterre. The ticket taker turned me away and told me that I could receive my money back at the box office. I was fortunate to get my money again without receiving a drubbing. I hate elegant men because I cannot myself be elegant. The shabby clothes which I had to wear in childhood were the cause of this attitude. I hated a friend because he wore a colored handkerchief where it could be seen and made fun of him. Inwardly I envied hinx SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF- ACCUSATION 183 4. The scales which fall from the head to the coat collar annoy me very much. For this reason I never wear dark clothes. (Then I think they make me stouter.) Scales are a sign of bodily decay and of age, just like my false teeth, which suddenly clack and crackle if I try to take a large bite. God — I try to control this. But I hate the word try. I have tried too much. I hate what is false, and I have so much that is false on m.e and in me, false teeth, false eyes (my glasses), false soles (my supports for flat feet). I am weary of the struggle. I feel myself inferior, mentally and physically. Dr. Stekel says I have lost courage. But have I not every reason so to do ? 5. The fifth disagreeable experience will not be recalled. I know there were five. I am standing up and smoking. I am thinking of the five fingers during onanism. Suddenly it occurs to me : The fifth commandment ! * Thou shalt not kill ! Whom have I killed, whom have I wanted to kill? My brothers' first names have five letters, my sister's name (Anita) also five letters. My wife, too. . . . Did I want to kill her? Wilde says that each one kills the thing he loves. I know that she often stands in my way. I have wanted to poison her. Dr. Stekel has interpreted some of my dreams as dreams of a poisoner. The dream with the blue berries which look like belladonna, and which my wife eats despite my warning, was the first of these dreams, and it was plain enough. I feel wild hatred in me. I feel that I am a fighting nature. My suicidal tendencies are murderous intentions directed inwardly. Yesterday I feared that F. S., to whom I was teaching English, would kill me because I dismissed him. Why? Because I wanted to kill Dr. Stekel. Why have I now a sensation of giddiness so that I cannot think further ? I would rather kill him than let him take from me my sister ideal. He has discovered my life plan. He has found out that I want to live with my sister. I once made a passing allusion to the fact that I had played with my sister. She held my penis in her fine, soft hands. I will never forget this feeling of pleasure. Never ! Never ! Never ! Dr. Stekel thinks that Marescha has taken over much that relates to the sister. She was my great love. But if I want to think further what I did with her, all is hazy. Did I possess her? Cunnilingus? Fel- latio ? All fantasy ; I only know how I came at night to her sweet body, how she played with me and I with her. I want to kill Dr. Stekel, because he wants to separate me from my sister. I want to kill every one whom I envy and who stands * See note, page 33 (Translator). i84 SADISM AND MASOCHISM in my way. Yesterday I saw a bashful youth in the theater with a charming girl. I could have flung him into an abyss so that he would have fallen into the depths with a cry of fear and been dashed to pieces. He will not advance in life anyway, and if he is broken to bits, everything is at an end. I think of the Burg- theater. Julius Cccsar. . . . How easily Caesar died after he had been stabbed by Brutus. To kill is a deed of kindness. You free men from their suffering. They want to die. I will help them to do so. My thoughts lose themselves in a labyrinth. Whom will I kill? The resistance against knowing is too great. But I feel the prepleasure, a psychic joy, let us say an orgasm, at the thought of killing a person at the moment of supreme pleasure, at seeing how he trembles with delight, how the ecstasy of the last violent orgasm shudders through his entire body — and he then no longer moves. He has granted me the highest satisfaction and will give it to no other person ! Here these notes close. We see at the end the death thoughts appearing, which may not become conscious to him. Now I should like to interpolate a part of the analysis. It would also explain to us the blow which I received from him. It was while we were taking a walk. (In the summer my treatment is almost always peripatetic.) I recognized from a dream the strong fixation upon his sister. Suddenly I saw that the patient had a secret life plan, to share the sister's life. His first mar- riage took place after the sister's marriage and was an attempt to be saved. He married a woman whom he did not love. The second marriage, too, occurred for intellectual reasons. He had resolved to marry the girl when he went to Germany, with- out knowing her. He had not even seen her picture. She is a quite extraordinary woman, an admirable character, a genuine fighter, who always knows how to put things through. A person of great intelligence, culture, and kindness. He could not have found a better wife. Precisely her superiority oppresses him, and he hates her on account of her good qualities and because he has reason to be grateful to her. He suffers from the fact that she is anaesthetic and believes a more powerful man would be able to bring her to an orgasm. His whole passion is fixed upon his sister. Only one girl, who was a distinct sister imago, could have bound him, but he SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 185 drew back at the decisive moment, for he would have had to enter into conflict with her father. He even left her last letter unanswered. He wanted merely a distance love to make it possible for him to transfer the feeling for the sister to an- other object, and he shrank from reality. It was now strange that in fantasy he completely annulled the marriage with his wife. He regarded himself as a single man. For a long time his dreams were incomprehensible to me, until I learned that in them all I had to put the sister into the wife's place. My wife — meant only the woman who might be my wife. Four persons stood in the way of this plan of life. His wife, his brother-in-law, and his two nephews. The death wishes and the murderous thoughts tended in this direction. I will bring another example on this occasion of the greatness of his talent for repression. He came to Vienna and took up his abode at a private house which I had recommended to him. After a short time he received a letter from his sister at the correct address. It was the first sign of life for more than a year. He brought me the letter, and it struck me at once that the letter was directed to the house mentioned. "You must have written her a letter in which you gave her your address.'' He denied it and could not explain it. Finally he came to realize that he had written the letter and immediately repressed the fact. His poison fantasies could now be understood. He had the plan of removing from the way his wife and other ''obstacles" and living with the sister. The sister was likewise fixed upon him. When he returned from Germany, she was cool and distant toward his wife. When he left Russia to come to me, he wrote to her that she should wait at the station in Moscow. They would pass through Moscow and be there for two hours. The sister did not come, although the brother had a number of times gone to her assistance. We come to the most important period of his life, the ap- pointment to the university. I have already stressed the fact that we have to do with a highly intellectual scholar, who is master of six languages, knowing how to speak and write them as well as his mother tongue, and has published several im- i86 SADISM AND MASOCHISM portant books. He was destined to achieve a prominent posi- tion in his native land. But every step forward increased the distance between him and his life goal, union with the sister. I have stated these attitudes, inasmuch as they help us to understand the following report : MY APPOINTMENT TO THE UNIVERSITY K. I was strongly resistant toward accepting the position. I once missed the train ; entered the wrong train. I considered the place unworthy of me. I should have received the first place at the first university. It was really a college for the education of priests, therefore not really the right university (lie Number i) ; and on the other hand I feared contact with the priests, to whom I was always drawn. They were too much like me with their repression of hideous sexual fantasies and their craving for power, which vented itself upon trembling sinners. These priests! I envied them and hated their stinking feet on Sunday morning. I arranged my life there comfortably enough and after some conflicts I was able to idle about to my heart's content. I was my own master. I could make a display of my own knowledge without taking the trouble actually to instruct the pupils. I really wanted to bury myself alive there. I was not afraid of my col- leagues. Each one had his own dirty linen to wash. If they had had anything bad to say about me, I should have been able to repay them in their own coin. The great man who had founded this place of culture with his millions had obtained his money through fraudulent advertising. And with the other authorities I played cards and made friends. Nr. told me that the students called me a ''poseur." That hit me. I admired the man who had the courage to throw my faults up to me. Nevertheless, I never forgave him. At the outbreak of the war came the penal inquisition. I was a pacifist and relied upon the czar's message of peace at his acces- sion to the throne. One day I received a summons to the secret police council. I had married a German. I said that I was a good patriot, but could not alter my conviction as a pacifist. In the end my answer was found to be a sufficient excuse, and I was released with a warning to be guilty of no agitation against the war. I had the feeling that I had proved myself a hero. (In reality I was equally anti-German. I could not forgive the German invasion of Belgium.) But my wife was able to change my sentiments and I sought to defend the Germans among my SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 187 comrades. The result was that I received an anonymous document which promised me a good beating. I Hved in fear during the whole period of the war that I might be denounced and impris- oned or banished to Siberia. My wife fell ill at that time and was operated upon for appendicitis. A friend of mine met me at the hospital and invited me to his home. There he threatened me with punishment and banishment if I did not get a divorce from my wife, the filthy "Boche." I hastened back to the hospital and told my wife everything. (Did I want to kill her?) I suffered frightful fear then that the Russians might poison her in the hos- pital. (Evident wish!) She stood between me and my native land. I think the time was like the situation in which I defended my father against the severe attacks of my mother. I was also jealous. I suspected that my wife was in love with the doctor, for she blushed in mentioning his name. I suspected a man who had massaged her, and whose visits she had denied herself because he had wanted to go too far. Had she told me the whole truth? About this time a professor of philosophy was talking with me about psychoanalysis. I was at once enthusiastic and requested him to analyze me. He had not yet analyzed any patient and hesitated a long time. Finally he undertook it. The effect was startling. I felt as if newborn. I told the rector that great events had taken place in my life. I began to love the whole world. I was gracious to my pupils and had soon become a favorite professor. I allowed them to recite poems, explained everything, and was in truth a playmate to them. New pupils came to me, and every one enjoyed the class. Teaching was a pleasure. I was in a continuous state of maniac excitement. Suddenly the obsessive thought came over me that my wife had committed suicide. Every time that I came home I expected to find her hanged or poisoned. Then came the affair with the anonymous letters, which I related to you the first day. They caused me unutterable anguish at first, until I discovered that I myself was the writer of the letters. I now felt guilty that I had so cruelly tortured and accused a student. I have many proofs that I myself wrote the letters. Later I put myself into a trance and wrote automatically the same letters with the same writing and in the same order. Everything had been forgotten ! How could I have done that and repressed it ? I remember only enter- ing a shop and buying ordinary paper and cheap envelopes, the cheapest to be had. Many months later I found that same paper and a similar envelope unused in a lower drawer of my desk, when SADISM AND MASOCHISM I was putting- it in order. (While I am writing this confession, I fall again into a similar dream state.) I stared at the paper for a long time ! So then ! I was the anonymous letter writer ! Then I was given leave of absence from the university because of illness. The papers received anonymous letters (written by me) in which teachers and pupils protested against this injustice. I began again to doubt. Had not some one else written the letters ? Then came the painful graphological investigation. I thought of turning to the greatest authorities. I also wanted to go to Petersburg and have my health tested by the first psychiatrists. My "id" did not permit this folly, although my wife requested it several times by letter. I had gone back to H., the city of my youth (a regression to the land of my childhood). I now Hved nine weeks in H., felt as fresh as a fish in water. I got up every morning at five o'clock and went walking in the bitter cold, analyzed all my friends and acquaint- ances, scattered sunshine everywhere, cast longing looks at lovely womanhood. My wife wanted me to come home. I delayed, for this was the happiest period of my life. I felt the omnipotence of thought and of my smile, the magically healing power of my hands, which needed only to touch in order to cure. I was Christ. I feel like that this minute. I can slay my foes and heal m}'' friends. I made thorough investigation of my father's life, searched through registers, questioned all the people who had known him, spoke sHghtingly and recklessly of his faults, until an older man, an acquaintance of his, thought I had gone too far. I invited myself as guest of various people, whom I must have wearied more than I entertained with my droll behavior; marched many kilometers through mud and rain to a seventy-three-year-old woman (despite my sore feet!) in order to analyze her. I was going to cure the whole world by psychoanalysis ; an aged cousin who for years had been confined to an invalid chair, an old monk of his alcoholism. . . . I was happy and saw no cloud in the sky. I even wanted to give public lectures and preach in the church, and I created a sen- sation in one society with my farewell speech. I went to another small city, where a friend had already read a number of books on analysis. One of his female students had also become interested in the new science. I analyzed him and her out of love, for a half a ruble an hour. I fell in love with my pa- tients and had to resist violent sexual temptations. I could relate much more from this period, but will pass over it. I accepted a position at a well-known university. I enjoyed my new work and hoped to be able to use my analytic knowledge SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 189 pedagogically. Only one thing disturbed me, that a former col- league had lost the position because he had had all sorts of homosexual experiences with the students. (As Dr. Stekel has proved to me, my fixed idea was to instruct my students in onan- ism.) The professor in question had often talked with me in K. of onanism and stated that he had cured many unfortunate youths by explaining to them that onanism was harmless and necessary. (His perversion I thought was fellatio, as a colleague told me, but it turned out that it had been a matter of "mutual onanism.") I was to take his position and feared that I would be considered in the same boat with him. Correct ! At the first meeting I was asked about B. and had to admit that I had heard of his "filthy doings." I reproached myself inwardly that I had not defended him and resolved to say nothing about psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, I per- mitted myself to be led to disclose to a comrade that I had been analyzed and that analysis had been very useful to me in teaching. It depressed me very much that he then made a few disparaging remarks about analysis. I made the same mistake in my instruc- tion as in K. I was dreamy and lazy, did not concern myself about my students' progress, and brought it about that the number of attendants was reduced from 140 to a quarter. I will say noth- ing of other errors and follies ; it would lead too far. The greatest act of folly was the meeting of the students once a week at my home (analytic evenings). There was much discussion of sexual problems, choice of profession, graphology. These evenings were for me a homosexual fantasy orgy. I was shy and confused when I met on the street those who had participated, especially when I left the college. I was afraid they would ridicule me. There was a charming girl among my students, the daughter of an influential man. I was not satisfied with her progress and at- tempted to help her through psychoanalysis. I spoke to her of her fixation upon father and brother and advised her to give up her studies. She wanted to move me to let her pass her examina- tions, which I indignantly refused. I know now that I wanted to win her love through the analytic transference. Then I hated her, because I could see no success to my wooing. I had to yield finally because her father's influence was so great that the rector and the dean gave me to understand that the girl must pass. This af¥air made me quite beside myself. I mentally analyzed the rector and the dean and found every kind of hateful complex in them. I analyzed their wives and established absolute frigidity. Natu- SADISM AND MASOCHISM rally all in my fantasy. I believed I could pierce their souls as with eagle eyes. I discovered criminal impulses in them. It was a dis- placement and projection of my own complexes upon others. For at this time I was under the dominion of my poison complex. I considered myself immune from poisoning and believed my wife would be poisoned. I studied all the analytic literature. One of Dr. Stekel's books also came into my hands. It was at once clear to me that he was the only one who could cure me. I gave up my position before I should lose it and went to Germany. I spent the last days before my departure as if in a dream. I was oblivious to everything, and my wife had to look after it all. The whole journey all at once ap- peared like a farce to me. In the railway carriage I played cards with people I did not know and lost a heap of money. I wanted to gamble away all my money — that was clear to me later — and drive my wife to despair and suicide. When she reproached me, I proposed to her that we divide our money. I therefore pre- pared myself for a separation. I did not want to give her any of the money I had earned. I hated her relatives and behaved in Germany like a fool. I talked of nothing but analysis and suddenly went to Vienna to visit Dr. Stekel. I will interrupt here the report from the journal. We will first seek to understand the remarkable maniac condition and its causes. We must consider that our patient was analyzed by two lay persons, who had both had only slight experience. The maniac state broke out in the course of the first analysis and continued into the second one. The first analyst was so shocked at the outcome and effect of the analysis that he gladly sur- rendered the patient to his friend. (The gentlemen are now bitter opponents, which unfortunately happens frequently with analysts.) The second analyst considered the state of excite- ment the result of homosexual transference. This was not the case. One observes that in analyses which come too quickly upon the complex, maniac states readily appear, which later are replaced by depression. The entire analytic work is annulled in consequence of the secondary repression. Here the fixation upon the sister and the play carried on with her were the causes of the maniac condition. I have seen similar cases in which after a short analysis with hypomaniac excitement the principle of letting it work itself off was followed. One should remem- SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 191 ber that these patients are ashamed of their complexes, that their consciences are heavily burdened. Our patient was essentially religious. As he writes in his diary, it had come to his knowl- edge that he had engaged in ''sexual orgies" with his sister. With his mother, too, things had happened which were a load upon his conscience. Now all at once he heard of the CEdipus complex and fixation on the sister as something to be expected. What had formerly seemed to him as a criminal exception now became the rule. The psychic disburdening was an excessive one. But still more! His secret life plan was the winning again of the sister. Now it was clear to him that he had the right to possess the sister. Analysis had raised the barriers without destroying his life purpose. Just as melancholia denotes the final renunciation of a secret love ideal, so the mania expresses the hope of attaining it. There were certain things manifested by our patient which were to make possible the realization of his life plan. He was omnipotent in his thoughts. He could have people live or die. Much more important was the assumption of immunity toward poisons. For he could poison others without dying himself of the poison which he might have taken with them. The first obstacle was his wife. Therefore he conceived the idea that she would take her own life. That would be the most con- venient way to get rid of her. Then he might poison her with her meal. He did not want under any circumstances to remain at the last two universities. He wanted to go to Moscow to his sister. Any permanent position was incompatible with his life plan. His religious complex manifested itself as bipolar. He was Christ and Judas. It was in the last sessions that I discov- ered his purpose to return uncured to Russia and disgrace me there for all time. For he wanted to become insane, and I was to be responsible for his insanity. Similar motives had also been operative in his first paralogic crisis. He was honor- able enough to give a farewell speech at a meeting of Inde- pendent Medical Analysts in which he acknowledged himself as Judas and exposed the existence of the plan to all present. His desire for punishment and humiliation arose not only from the feeling of guilt. He wanted to bring it about ■ 192 SADISM AND MASOCHISM that he would be thrown upon his sister's aid. His wife would leave him, then he would be compelled to go to his sister and request her assistance. That would be the first step, which then would be followed by putting out of the way his brother-in-law and nephews. I will now give some dreams which occurred before the present analysis, therefore were not influenced by me. We shall see clearly from them the attitude toward his sister and the family. His diary of dreams is particularly interesting. He reproduces also his associations and interpretations. But one notices that he evades the decisive portions and will not see the truth. First dream: I had a bad day. Was that the result of the dream? I brought out of my ear a large, almost spherical piece. It consisted of two parts. The outer thick part crumbled under my fingers. The inner part remained in my hand. It was softer, yet of the con- sistency of cork, but not so tough. The piece was brown with white stripes. I had a faint satisfaction in pulling it out and awoke without especial affect. What must the dream mean ? May it symbolically represent the destruction of my paraphilia? The piece was too large to have come from the ear. It occurs to me as an afterthought that I first poked around with the earpick and took out some friable, flaky bits, which I easily rubbed away between my fingers. I re- member that once I brought to light with the earpick a small bit of wax which must have lain there for years inasmuch as I never before had used such a cleaning instrument. I thought also of my wish not to hear for fear of hearing disparaging remarks about myself. (Now my left ear is beginning to itch.) It occurs to me that we say that the left ear burns or rings if any one is speaking ill of us. I feel intensive resistance in pursuing these associations. I think I should now wash my F.^ after my wife. Then I must shave. A cold shudder runs down my back. I think now of Mr. F. who committed suicide with a razor. Two thoughts dominate him, which he will not permit to become conscious. His sister is thinking of him, therefore his left ear burns and rings. And he would like to kill his wife that his way may be free. Suicide impulses in conse- SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 193 quence of the thoughts of murder. The piece brought out is too great to pass the orifice; thus it may be the dream means that in reality it will stay within. This piece is his love to his sister. Coitus is symbolized as a cylindrical object in the ear (lingam symbol. — Religious connection: impregnation of Mary through the ear). He dreams that he is washing his wife's feet. He is Christ. There is also relation to his sister, for whom he would gladly per- form the humblest services. In the diary he notes this dream as one of remorse, as a penance. He will make amends to his wife for his want of love and do her a service (religious connection — Christ washes the feet of Magdalene). Third dream : My wife and I are boarding a ship. We have to show our pass or some other document before we may go on board. The man who has to watch the entrance throws me as I wait a look of con- fidence as if to say : "Now you are on the right track." Then he gives me three documents to be filled out. There are three heads and I am in doubt whether I can fill them out before the ship starts. Hazy memory as to whether we gave up the excursion or the journey. Remarks: Similar dreams have appeared repeatedly. I said to my wife that these dreams should keep me from a plan for the carrying out of which energy and temperament are wanting. It relieves me to write down this remark. The plan is his life plan. Before he embarks upon the ship for a new journey through life he has to fill out three death certificates. He has no time for this and he will have to give up the sister. Therefore the great relief. The next dream shows how difficult is for him the new task set by analysis. I am in a shed where a quantity of rubbish is lying around. I ought to clean the shed. In the middle stands a cask in which are much more compact pieces of these scraps. Then a larger heap of this refuse begins to move, takes form, and dances about the room. It is a place of wreckage of his psyche. The complexes, especially the sister complex, are broken to fragments. But SADISM AND MASOCHISM the individual parts take form and become alive. They are therefore not destroyed as far as he is concerned. The dream was precipitated through an experience of the previous day. A magician in a variety show had filled his staff with chips and closed it. When he opened it, there were bonbons within, with which he treated the audience. George, too, has supernatural powers and can make that which is destroyed live again. The next dream brings other pictures : I was in a field that changed easily into a pond, where I sat in a boat. There were other people in boats further away, but yet within speaking distance. Suddenly a friend of my youth, a manly, courteous, attractive, energetic fellow, an ideal of a man, such as I should like to be, with an airplane, flew very low, and called to me to grasp the cable (which hung from the machine and was dragging on the water), if I wanted to climb in. I carried out his order and called loudly to the people in the machine that I was doing it. I seized the rope and climbed up with the intention of boarding the airplane and flying in it. Then I concluded to allow myself to be carried by the rope and put off the actual flight until some later time. My friend hailed me from above at speaking distance and asked me how it was going with me. (I have been addressed in a similar way by stronger men when working with them.) At last we came to a stubble field. I seemed again to be neither in the water nor in the boat, but hung to the cable until my friend landed at a hut near the edge of a wood. (There seemed again to be full-blooded men present in this house.) My friend said to me: "You will not sleep the first night after you have flown !" He seemed to divine my purpose, which had ma- tured in the meantime, the next time to fly with him. I awoke at his words. The dream was accompanied with pleasant feelings. His need to lean upon some one appears in this dream. He is no man and would like to be a complete man. Another (the analyst) should aid him. He passes over the stubble field of his psyche. Mere hopes, which are not realized. Homosexual complexes are mixed with these motives. The airplane is a symbol of his air castles and airy figures. But he now hopes for fulfillment. To be sure, he must be a complete man in order to bring his life plan to perfect fruition. ' SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF- ACCUSATION 195 The next dream shows his attitude toward his brother : My brother G. pursued me with his revolver. I found one, too, and defended myself. We followed each other in the gateway of a house. Suddenly he laid down his weapon and surrendered himself to my tender mercies. Then he seized the pistol, and I bid him stop, but he ran about brandishing the weapon as if he had not heard me. I spoke to him in Alexandrines : O, mon f rere ! que je vous hais!" ["O my brother, how I hate you!"] (Or were there two verses?) It is not only the brother whom he hates, not merely a homo- sexual scene ; it is the conflict with his parapathic ego. The following passage in his diary teaches us of the dangers of his life plan: I dreamed that I went over a bridge and reached a perilous posi- tion upon free-swinging connecting beams, while laborers moved before me upon the dangerous way without any trouble. I seemed to have fallen carelessly into the situation. I trusted myself to the bridge because I thought everything was secure. I think of the analysis and how dangerous it is to gaze into man's psyche without considering the consequences. This dream reminds me of stereotyped dreams in which I wander in confusion through dangerous streets (gooseflesh). This want of foresight comes from the complexes concerning my plan of life and obstructs my daydreams, which are filled with megalomania. I may not only outline plans, I also have to think of their consequences. Certain plans are dangerous. I have to con- sider thoroughly the pros and cons. Only that can give me rest (poise). He speaks of poise, that is, psychic equilibrium, and comes very close to the poison complex. The patient reveals clear insight into his illness. But he does not recognize that the most important plan is the winning of the sister after poison- ing his rivals. His sister appears in the next dream under the guise of a pupil. I dreamed last night of Miss B., otherwise a reserved, prudish creature. She came to me at the corner of the street on a hard run with beating heart and in great excitement. I said to her, 196 SADISM AND MASOCHISM "Everything is all right," and threw my left arm around her waist ; with my right hand I touched her pounding breast, was delighted with the maidenly form of her bosom, and embraced her force- fully. She grew calm and smiled blissfully. I have never particu- larly liked this girl; now she appears in my dreams. I found a series of associations which lead to my sister. What does that signify? The next dream is still more plain, with wonderful symbolism. My wife gave me sweets to eat. I tasted them and suddenly saw two small animals (vermin) hanging on them. The bonbons were elongated and delicate; the two tiny friends hung to one piece. They were mouse-colored and did not move. I showed them to my wife and told her I could not eat them. She looked at me kindly, yet I could not suppress a slight fear. I was anxious not to hurt her feelings. My wife said the animals were familiar to her; she knew a whole colony not far from her home. They had built a highway into her city over which no one might pass. They form an exclusive society. There they dwell quite undisturbed. I have been struggling with disgust during the writing, had to take out my teeth and lay aside my cigar. I vomited a little before putting the teeth back. My digestive organs have become quite disordered. His wife again stands for the sister. The cunnilingus which he had practiced with her is represented as contaminated food. The total complex forms a separate colony in his brain, to which he allows no one access. The animals are naturally friendly, for they symbolize a pleasurably toned memory. . . . The moral reaction is expressed as disgust and vomiting. He is omnipotent; he will also accomplish his secret plans. The next dream shows him in possession of magic powers : I demonstrated to a group of men my powers of levitation. Every object which I touched followed my hand as if drawn by a magnet. He sees in another dream a razor with three sharp edges. We know that three people must be put out of the way. The motive of the document that he must fill out in order to be admitted somewhere is always being repeated. I have been working with Mr. Bird to prepare credentials which permit one to enter our country. Bird commissioned me to test SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 197 them. One of these papers had above the address ''Moscow" and had still some pages to be filled out. Bird said to me, as he saw me sitting embarrassed before the papers, not knowing what I should do, "Oh, you can throw that one away!" I did not understand why. He explained to me that the various questions were ques- tions of form and were already filled out with No or Never. I wanted to fill out another document, when it occurred to me I had forgotten to go to class. Furthermore, I was not prepared for the lecture. It was ten o'clock and I had to go to the church. I called to Bird that I had neglected my class on his account. Mr. Bird is the bird of death; the document is the death certificate. His sister lives in Moscow. The rest of the dream can be understood. He is innocent ; he can appear before God without guilt (to the church). Death has removed the ob- stacles. His belief is mixed with doubt. The next dream shows this : Professor B. is lecturing on the Bible. He really is preaching a sermon. But he makes witticisms and plays upon words and mingles these in his sermon, so that the people laugh and make remarks aloud. The sister appears in various dreams, always in the form of a girl who has once pleased him and whom he could not hold. The point of comparison is the fact that these girls are lost to him. He ascends in a lift and notices that it is not designed for passengers. He wants to reach a certain room in the building ; he has to get there and yet cannot. He is forever representing the unattainableness of his ends (ideal). A stereotyped dream reads : There is a staircase the steps of which wind upward in two parts. You go up one stair, it leads to no end ; you have to go back and pant up another stair, which also leads to a closed door. You run up and down and cannot reach your goal. . . . Yes — his sister belongs to another man. This is expressed in the next dream. I am on the street and am waiting for a train or an electric. The train approaches. It seems to be a locomotive. There are two 198 SADISM AND MASOCHISM spots where the train might stop. I do not know where I should place myself and fear I will choose the wrong one so that I cannot board the train. The conductor (no, the engineer), a powerfully large, athletic man, seems to want to help me. I climb upon the locomotive, seat myself near the engineer, instead of going back where the passengers are. The engineer seems to interest himself in me and observes me attentively. We both dismount, go to my home, and speak German. I am pleasantly surprised that he speaks German so fluently. ... A gap here. ... In my house. The engineer is with my wife in a sleeping room. I am talking with some one in the adjoining room. Suddenly I hear a lively con- versation in the sleeping room between my wife and the engineer. It seems that the door is half open. I go into the bedroom and find my wife, her legs naked and spread apart (upon her back), while the man in question is pinching her thighs with his fingers ; he then knocks on them with full consent on the part of my wife, at which he looks at me smilingly and says: "Your wife has wonderful legs!" He is stronger than I, and I have to look on without a struggle against it. I merely say "Yes," and begin to admire my wife's charms and to touch her legs. One who knows the disguises of homosexuality knows at once that this is a case of the tertium cohahitationis [a third person in cohabitation]. But the entire scene reminds him of the unforgettable love scenes with the sister. The engineer stands for the brother-in-law, who is a strong man and who here permits him to share his pleasure. The representation of the fear of missing his train is interesting. The simplified formula of the dream is: If I cannot have her alone, I will share her with the brother-in-law. Another dream is immediately joined to this one, which has to do with the indestructibility of infantile impressions. He finds finger marks and drawing pins on his coat collar. The culprits are students, who are making fun of him. He is likewise dominated by the fear that he might give way to his impulses and do himself harm. The presentiment of coming evil is expressed in the next dream : I was in a very high house, as in the last story of an American skyscraper. I looked out of the window and saw a large black cloud coming over us. (I had the feeling that there was some- thing else in the room, but I did not know what it was or who.) SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 199 I felt that the storm would shake the house and with terrific force, but thought the house would be strong enough to withstand the blow. Then came the cyclone and swept the house on the side of my window. For a moment the house remained quiet. Then it began to incline to one side. I stood in the center of the room and reflected whether I could be rescued. "No," I said to myself, "there is no hope. Even if you stretch yourself safely on the floor you will be buried beneath the ruins." I cried aloud, "Plead for us, O God !" — and slid gradually to the side to which the house leaned. Then I thought it was only a dream and I could save myself by waking up, which I did. The danger in which he hangs arises from a definite fixed idea, which I was soon able to discover. He was his brothers' and his sister's teacher in sexual practices. His fixed idea is to perform onanism before his class and instruct them in onanism. This is the source of his inability to teach. Even the dream of the drawing pins which are stuck in his collar shows this fixed idea. Still more plainly the dream : I am performing onanism before a group of persons and awake with a pollution. His anonymous letter? were therefore justified. He had every reason for self -accusation. The next dream betrays a great deal : The students are sitting very closely together in my class and helping one another in their tasks. I become wild and give the order for them to sit so far apart that one cannot see the work of another. I feel myself impotent (the expression is underlined three times in his diary) and fear they will ridicule me. I am in another class where a woman is lecturing. She lifted her hands high and cried out that the students were to do everything she wanted them to do, otherwise they would remain there. She seemed also to give a sign how I should treat the pupils, not so much as to the manner of instruction, but how I should let them go. I wondered that I was not in my class in order to verify whether the students were deceiving me, but I thought : It is time to dismiss them ; it is too late ; and I was glad to be through. The woman seemed to me to be very clear-headed and of strong will and to look upon me as a weakling. Now I recall a recurring dream: I have always suppressed it SADISM AND MASOCHISM when it was coming to consciousness. I am teaching alternately in a class with a woman. I am always in doubt what I shall do and try to get through quickly. No one regards me or respects my words. When I go to work, things do not go right. I am dis- heartened and confused. Then I often dream that I am professor of sexual anecdotes ; I do not like them and do not go to the lec- ture. Nevertheless, I will not give up the position. I often go in, give the students their assignments, then everything becomes mixed up and the dream grows confused. I feel that I am condemned to fail because so much in my work does not suit me. In other dreams I go through classes full of students, whom I have to pass because I have arrived too late. I have to ask the way to my class. The instructor reproachfully but courteously shows me the way. I know that I have many dreams of teaching which oppress me. It seems to me that I always am putting aside some im^ portant task. I greet with joy every opportunity to get out of teaching. This happens in the dream as in reality. I was the first in a conference of professors to advocate holidays. I knew that my pupils hated me, therefore I hated to have them come. I wanted to sacrifice to them nothing of my personality or of my precious time. They were objects for me (twice underlined). Not beings created by God worthy of instruction. I wanted them to admire my scholarship, but I kept them in uncertainty so that they should not discover my superficiality. Any one who reads the dream carefully will discover how the professor rationalizes his resistances. The pupils are for him, alas, not objects, not neutral beings, but living ones. And particularly handsome lads, for whom he assumes a large penis and whom he loved homosexually ; these he hated, felt himself persecuted and ridiculed by them. He wanted to perform on- anism before them and with them! In fact, had he been a woman, teaching would have been much easier. If he only had a large penis, of which he could have boasted ! After two days another dream appears in connection with this one, showing clearly the phallic symbols : I came upon a nest of chickens. They were black and were in a large room that looked like a store. They threatened me, and I awoke in terror. The chickens were unusually large, thin, and had long furry plumage. I saw neither their eyes nor their claws. It was precisely their hair that so impressed me. . . . SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 201 The large room is the schoolroom. It is the hair on the mons Veneris which always makes a great impression upon him. His exhibitionistic desires and the fear of being seen and recognized are described as counterparts in the next dream : I am fondling my wife. She is half naked and standing. Her clitoris enlarges, springs erected from the vulva like a small penis. We both have our satisfaction. It seems that there is no place in the house to carry on the play. We go to the veranda and lie down on the bed there. Many people go by, and although the veranda is somewhat higher than the street, they can easily ob- serve that a couple are embracing. Our feet seem to be turned toward the street. I say to my wife, after we have made some movements which would betray us, that we ought to be careful so that the people passing should not see us. At this moment three or four children, eight or nine years old, come from the side. They speak in a very friendly manner and naturally we are glad to answer them. One of them, a girl I believe, says : "I know you! Do you know me?" Then the girl softly disappears; she seems offended. The dream is over. The girl that appears here is his sister. The age accords with the period in which he began his play with her. The other children are his brothers. The bisexual tendency (the wife with the penis) and the wish to exhibit are so transparent that further commentary is unnecessary. He knows that something in his heart is not in order. The next dream reveals this : Our cuckoo clock was going badly. I was looking to see what could be the matter. I noticed that it hung higher at the right than at the left. The stroke was also not even — tick-tack. ... I re- called that the clock maker had said I should not hang it obliquely, otherwise the stroke would be irregular. It seemed in the dream as if some one in my absence had taken down the clock and then hastily and carelessly hung it up again. The clock was in a case or a frame and seemed to have caught on the right side. Right as seen by me, therefore left. While attempting to straighten it I awoke. The fixation upon the sister is plainly represented as the fixation of the clock in its frame. The irregular stroke and the SADISM AND MASOCHISM disturbance through a stranger (the brother-in-law) are trans- parent symbolism. Fellatio fantasies with his students (he played school with his brothers) arise. See the following dream: I hasten to the lecture and have under my arm a treatise upon birds, when I meet Professor Bird. The work was returned to me by a man to whom I had lent it. The man stuck the book into my pocket. (Why did I say stuck it in?) The book had a yellow cover, which was dirty and creased from frequent use. I thought Bird will see the book. (He always sees everything like a bird.) I hastened up the stairs to get to my lecture hall and came through Bird's lecture room ; he was already sitting before his students. I noticed that I had a lighted cigar in my mouth. Bird said at once: '*Well, then! You're fired!" or "Now I've caught you!" I snatched the cigar out of my mouth and threw it into a box or a basket near with a loud blow (louder than a cigar actually could strike), so loud that Bird must have heard it. I went into my office and saw that I was smoking the same cigar which I had thrown away. I again threw it into a basket, which was filled with crumpled white paper. The paper seemed to catch fire from the burning end of the cigar. I thought there would be no danger, although it began to glow. I stamped out the fire with my foot. The basket stood under the table. I dragged it to the center of the room, where it could burn up without doing any further damage or setting other objects on fire. Then I was speaking with some one about the occurrence. He said I should guard myself against erotism, which moved itself near the center and then broke into flames. I wondered whether this fire would injure my reputa- tion and my position in the college. A cylinder occurs to him further in relation to erotism, in the damaged middle of which the erotism lodged. We see evi- dent fellatio fantasies and the desire for their repetition. A cigar which he has thrown away is again in his mouth. He is afraid the fire of his passions might overpower him. The work (he calls it also pamphlet or monograph) is like the penis, which is stuck into his pocket. Mr. Bird (rector of the uni- versity) is also an image of the omnipotent, omniscient father (Jupiter's eagle and the doves of the Lord). Women with a small penis frequently appear to him, who represent his sister. An example of such a dream : SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 203 I was with two girls in their sleeping room. We were lying in a broad double bed. It seemed to me as if I had been busy at their school. It was a bright day, and we were chatting in a friendly way. It was a warm summer day and I said something about the women being allowed to wear light clothing. One of the girls at my request raised her light airy garment and revealed herself as quite naked. She had on drawers only and had a small penis and a scrotum like a child of six. She seemed to be de- lighted to be able to demonstrate to me how light her clothes were and then made several seductive movements. I awoke with a pollution. The small penis is his infantile penis, which had always re- mained behind the normal. The dream means that his penis is forever fixed upon the sister. A stereotyped motive : the woman with the penis. Other dreams are still more transparent and repeat the scenes with the sister of which I have spoken in detail. I give one example : I was in a bed with my sister. She touched my glans ; I had ex- traordinary satisfaction and the fluid streamed from the phallus upon the board at the foot of the bed. The fluid was like water. I tried to wash off the spot, but it did not dry. At this moment some one came in whom I did not wish to see me in this situation. The sense of voluptuous pleasure at the touching of the glans cannot be described. . . . The dream brings two themes : first, the memory of his strongest orgasm, that is, the one with the sister, which he stresses even consciously; second, the indestructibility of this memory, which is at the same time a sin and a blot upon the soul. If we look back upon the analysis we come to the conclusion that his feeling of inferiority and his sadism are connected. For his small figure and small penis were the misfortune of his life. If he compared himself with his father — and he had been doing that up to this time — he was seized with violent envy of the father's penis. He would have liked to castrate all men and mutilate all women who had a large vagina. His ideal is a small creature who fits him, and whom he can satisfy. SADISM AND MASOCHISM But he has learned to know but one being in his life in whom these requirements are met and that is his sister. His parapathy actually set in with the marriage of his sister. Any means was justified by which he could return to her. I have fully described the criminal ideas which bound themselves to this fixed idea. A second infantile constellation ruined his life. He was the sexual instructor of his brothers and his sister. Every school became to him a picture of his family and set before him the same task. He had every reason to accuse himself. It was his con- science which had written the letters. He felt unworthy of being really an instructor of youth. A second motive, to be unfortunate, to be driven to his sister's aid, after his wife should have left him, supported the parapathic structure. He was a scholar of rare intelligence and exceptional knowl- edge. He was called to do great things. Now he has his analysis behind him. I gather from his letters that he still has to struggle powerfully against his fixed ideas, and that he has finally protected himself by disclosing his life plan to his ex- cellent wife. But progress is being made; he takes pleasure in his work and in his teaching. His work has public recognition. The conflict is not yet over. The danger of a paralogy seems to have been averted, and unless all signs are deceptive his ship will soon ride safely into the harbor of good health. I have no doubt that similar cases would reveal a similar motivation. We shall find everywhere as the motive of self- accusation and self -mutilation the consciousness of guilt, which forces the original sadist to masochistic acts of atonement. The role of the innocently accused is best suited to the person who secretly considers himself guilty. The literature concerning parapathic and paralogic self- mutilation is very rich. Unfortunately, complete analyses of such cases are wanting. The only analyzed case — it is really the beginning of an analysis — is the case from Dr. Heinz Hart- mann,^ which I will give in somewhat abbreviated form : Case Number 39. Otto F. was sent for observation to the psy- chiatric clinic in Vienna, February 17, 1921, under order of the supreme court for criminal affairs. The proceedings in regard to SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 205 participation in a robbery were ended upon advice of the court psychiatrist. The patient had injured both eyes during detention with spHnters of glass, after having made the attempt previously to hang himself in his cell. F. was born in 1890; married; merchant. His childhood was affected by very unhappy family conditions. His mother had on the whole paid little attention to him ; when he was three years old, he went at her wish to live with the mistress of a boarding house and remained there until the beginning of his school years. Ac- cording to the father's statement, the mother was a "rabid woman with a fearfully sensual disposition"; she had beaten the patient a great deal, frequently also about his head. She lived very badly with her husband ; disputes which degenerated into scenes of beat- ing were the order of the day. She deceived him again and again and that before the eyes of her child, before whom, as the father said, she 'Vas in no way embarrassed." Later attacks of rage, which grew more and more frequent, together with these scenes, led to divorce. The woman is now living in another city and there, although already fifty years old, leads a "very immoral life." The father is a quiet, staid, modest, not unintelligent man, frequently somewhat nervous. Two of the mother's immediate family were "perhaps mentally diseased," at any rate very nervous, but nothing more precise could be learned concerning them. A surprisingly large number of memories are still to-day at the command of F. ; from the period when he lived with the board- ing-house mistress and from the school time succeeding this. But few contradictions appear in his accounts of these years, either in regard to the content of the experiences or their chronological re- lationship. Furthermore, all his statements were in everything essential confirmed by his father. F.'s sexual curiosity was awak- ened early. He sees himself at the age of three playing with other children at the washing trough, when he undresses a girl com- pletely and feels of her genitals. Nights when he sleeps with the boarding-house keeper, he "tickles around on her." At four years of age he has his first erection, and has presumably already begun onanism. He remembers clearly that when he was six he had a lively interest in what was in the abdomen, but especially in the female genital parts. Once he even wanted to cut open the belly "to see what was inside." When he came back to his parents' house in his seventh year, he directed his interest most of all to his mother. He always observed from the next room when the father rubbed the mother, then he performed onanism 2o6 SADISM AND MASOCHISM while imaging the parents' coitus. In these years there was fre- quent mutual touching with girls of his own age and attempts at coitus with a servant; **this was at that time almost daily/' He had always to think of the mother while doing this ; he had already the wish, which later appeared still more clearly, "to do with his mother just what his father did." He also had to he thinking all the time why his mother did not go away from the father ; he could take the father's place with her. When he was seven years old the mother often made his looking badly an excuse for leaving home with him. She would then meet a man whom she kissed. When the patient saw this for the first time he was very sad: **It was horrible to me." Later he learned to like the man, for the latter gave him so many presents. If the mother went to sleep at a hotel with her lover, she always took him along into the room, but first made him drunk. He would then be on the watch, look into the window to see if he could not observe something. "I had at the time a peculiar feeling; I was myself very much excited." He at- tended school very irregularly, was a poor student, ran after all the girls. "He would have liked best as a little fellow to have gone over his own mother," his father said about him. When he was fourteen, his mother finally drove him from the house. He became an assistant at a shop, but never remained long in any position. He was frequently in the intervals without work and was then furnished with money by the father without the mother's knowledge. At times he supported himself as a pedlar. He was punished the first time by the law when he was sixteen for picking pockets ; some years after, because of robbing of show win- dows, he was condemned to ten months' imprisonment. He had seen the key to the shop hidden, and "I suddenly had an impulse to steal which I had to follow." Two years later he was again condemned for the same delict. Stealing gave him delight ; he had a decided feeling of pleasure and could not resist the temptation to do it. His first normal coitus occurs in his seventh year. The first woman with whom he had a fairly long relationship was a widow who had four children and was about twelve years older than he. The patient was fond of her, although she was very jealous and frequently created unpleasant scenes. This woman's seven-year- old daughter was always coming to bed with him and playing with him, but there was never any sexual intercourse with her. From 1912 on he again lived with an older woman, who was portress at a brothel. This woman forced him to have intercourse with her ; SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 207 but he did it with reluctance, for she was repugnant to him. Then for the first time he craved sexual relation with little girls. He had, it is true, two years previously been approached by a twelve- year-old girl who had already been sexually abused by her father. This interested him. She ofifered herself to him, and he would have been very glad to have had intercourse with her, but at that time he was too much afraid of the law. In the years that fol- lowed the patient became more and more nervous ; he himself and those about him suffered from his frequent excited states. He married two years ago, "to rid himself of the old woman," and since then has worked as salesman in his wife's store. He had acquired syphilis shortly before the wedding and has been treated since with repeated injections. He was always very brutal with his wife; there have been frequent scenes and he has beaten her a good many times. For perhaps a year now the irresistible im- pulse is continually seizing him to have sexual intercourse with female children, and several times there has been actual coitus with such little girls. The patient has often reproached himself for it and has tried to fight against the impulse, but is always worsted in the struggle. Frequently also quite old women have exercised upon him a strong sexual stimulus. F. has often been impotent with his wife, but toward children is sure of his potency. Mean- while he has practiced onanism often, at times even excessively, the last months always while thinking of little girls. In the dreams of the last months a scene repeats itself in which he is having sexual intercourse with his mother. For some time there has been a compulsion to burn money. The patient has yielded at times to this impulse. He cannot say why he does it ("it is foolish ... it is a disease"). He judges in the same way the obsessive impulse which has appeared again and again in the last year to throw him- self or his wife from the window. "When I am standing at a win- dow I have to hold on to myself that I do not jump out." The pa- tient also makes foolish purchases, which are away beyond his means and have many times brought him and his wife to em- barrassment. He knows no reason for so doing. *Tt just came over me." He repeatedly manifests suicidal intentions, speaks also of the fact that he must blind himself so that everything shall seem to him as in a dream. He was arrested shortly before Christmas, 1920, for a considerable purchase and during deten- tion wounded himself severely in both eyes with splinters of glass, so that when received in the clinic he was almost entirely blind. 208 SADISM AND MASOCHISM F. is approximately oriented as to time and place in the clinic, is clear and well ordered. He is sometimes rather irritable, sus- picious, sometimes also a little supercilious, tends to vacillation in mood. He sits for the most part by himself, has little to say to the other patients. He does not complain of his blindness; one has on the contrary the impression that he is well satisfied with this condition. He is well endowed intellectually. There is a traumatic cataract on each eye; the clouded masses of the lenses have protruded into the anterior chamber. Patient is almost blind. The one pupil, still easily visible, reacts promptly and amply to light and accommodation. There is ankylosis of the left knee joint. The right Achilles reflex is absent. Otherwise somatically nothing noteworthy. F. gives as a motive for blinding himself the hope that if blind he would have rest from his sexual longing for children. He wanted to spare his wife further unpleasantnesses. He was always having to think he ought to tear out his eyes. "How did he come to think of it?" "It just came to me of itself." Then F. began to interest himself in the question "whether blind people also are capable of an evil deed, whether they also are so rabid." Several blind piano players whom he has learned to know "have old ugly wives and yet live in harmony with them." One of his friends who has been homosexual and has also had relations with little girls has become blind, after an unsuccessful attempt at suicide : "He has lived happily and in peace since then, and has rest from the impulse." F. admits when questioned that the thought of blinding himself came to him long before these experiences of others. Since blinding himself the patient feels "so calm, so happy, much better than for a long time." During the whole period of his sojourn at the clinic landscapes and tapestry designs appear vividly before his senses. They reveal themselves quite independently of his will, but he acknowledges their subjective character. They all have in common the quality of peace, tranquillity : "I see beau- tiful pictures, green landscapes, mountains and valleys, tapestry patterns. I have such a feeling of happiness in my head; I see hills, trees ; it is so quiet. . . . The tapestries have different lovely colors, chiefly dark red." He believes that he will now be an en- tirely different person and no longer entangle himself in question- able affairs. In his thoughts he is frequently with his family. At first after the blinding F. still longed now and then for little girls, but in a few days he was completely free from such thoughts and SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF-ACCUSATION 209 his inclination and interest began to turn more than formerly to his wife. When she comes to visit him at the clinic, he is par- ticularly affectionate and kind to her. Psychoanalysis was begun with the patient, which, however, had to be broken off after the third session on account of his energetic refusal to be treated further. I will report here just one dream from the analytic material obtained, which in many respects is very revealing and is sufficiently transparent even on the basis of our brief effort at interpretation. The dream reads : I dreamed that I had stolen trousers. I was afraid that I would be pursued by the police. They were short trousers, like the Styrian trousers; they were deerskin trousers. A woman was there in the shop ; at last it was a ( ?) ; the woman was talking of gray shoe leather. This occurs to him: "My wife had said that she was going to have something made of leather, shoes; that was this week." He had several times in the last days had a sexual desire for his wife. The animal leather had felt like the wife's sexual parts. "Formerly I would willingly have stolen what came to my hand, even many years ago. I have taken little things, scissors or what lay upon the desk. I had a satisfaction in so doing, even a direct pleasure. I usually gave the stolen articles back later." He was sorry in the dream that he had taken nothing better. He had a second dream the same night : I was in a butcher shop; there were pieces of meat of two or three kilograms in weight. I was afraid that I would have to take them. Then I went into the anteroom and took a piece. I put it in a rubbish box where there was much paper, dirty paper, and thought I would fetch it away later. The twenty-seventh of February F. was committed to the state insane asylum "at the Steinhof" and from there after a few days sent home. The excellent analysis of this case suggests similar cases in the literature in which blindness represents a talion when the eyes have sinned. The case of Coffin ^ is worthy of notice, which may have been that of a schizophreniac. The dissolute but religious man, fifty-two years old, heard the voice of God, which said to him : "You have sinned with your eyes, have seen your daughter's maidenhood; tear out your eyes which have seen the offense." Other patients refer to the Biblical saying 210 SADISM AND MASOCHISM from the Sermon on the Mount: *lf thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee." Hartmann recognizes the fixation upon the mother, considers the older women with whom the patient cohabits as mother imagoes, and alludes also to the blindness of (Edipus, as well as to displacement from below to above (castration complex). The case is interesting even on the ground that the patient himself rejects analysis from an inner feeling. What good would it do him ? It would probably make him very unhappy, while he now feels relatively good. He wanted his blindness, because he knew too much of his childhood. We recognize in this case that the repression and the forgetting of pathogenic events can under certain circumstances be curative; in every case they are to be conceived as an attempt at self-healing (provisional treatment) of the sick mind. In the patient's deed there is expressed a strong will to blindness, which I have desig- nated as a "wanting not to see." Analysis after the deed would be useless; it would have had meaning only if the self-blinding could have been prevented. We see in this case an impulse which seeks in vain for dis- charge. The patient evinces kleptomania (sense of pleasure in stealing), further oniomania (impulse to buy), disposition to pyromania (burning money), and obsessive impulse to throw himself or his wife out of the window. We must assume after our experience that behind these impulses another impulse is concealed, of which the patient is unconscious. This impulse seems to be lust murder. He wants to cut open a woman's abdomen to see what is within. His youthful memories bear witness to this (compulsion to cut open the belly to see how it looks inside) . The dream of the pieces of meat which he appro- priates to himself and hides in a rubbish box also testifies to this. The trousers dream also has relation to his sadistic com- plex. The leather from the wild animal is in fact a flayed skin and feels like a genital, by which he completes the identifi- cation of leather and genital. Besides, the short trousers point to an infantile complex. The patient's wish is directed to pos- session once more of the mother. The many incest dreams of the latter period, which he himself admits, suggest this. The desire goes still further. He would like to be a child again SELF-MUTILATION AND SELF- ACCUSATION 211 and listen in the dark when his mother has intercourse with the strange man. He says himself that he blinded himself so that everything would come to him as in a dream. The patient was in truth alcoholized by the mother before her *'scene in the room," so that he has only a dim recollection (a pecular feeling; he was very much excited at the time). He is seeking this scene ; he will experience this scene again. He needs the dark- ness for this, which shall remind him of the dark room. (Cer- tainly there is another motive present, that he will displace the unsuccessful repression of this scene through blindness : He will not see!) Then he can even take his wife as his mother, to which the striking affectionateness toward her after the blind- ing testifies. Probably sadistic fantasies (revenge of the re- jected son!) are connected with this scene. He takes venge- ance on the lover and the dissolute mother, who have ruined his life. His pedophilia is still to be explained. It is likely from our experience that he identifies himself with the mother and se- duces a child. Only an analysis could show whether this is a matter of a wish, a fantasy, or an experience. One can believe of such a mother that she would play with a little child if the nymphomaniac impulse overcame her. We have again come upon a motive which is always in this book thrusting itself into the foreground, the dissolute mother. The patient in another environment might have become a healthy and perhaps successful man. We may see in the self- blinding also a displacement from below to above. What he wanted to perform upon his mother (castrate her, cut out her genitals, make her incapable of harlotry), that he accomplishes upon his own eyes. We do not understand why this blinding should take the place of his own castration. This he might have performed upon himself, like other patients, without hav- ing to grasp a symbolic substitute. We can agree with Hart- mann when he sees in this act a functional symbol in Silberer's sense. But the action seems to me to have several determinants, and the statement that he wanted to protect himself against his pedophiliac impulses I think is more of a rationalization than a fundamental reason. It is certain that such a deed is dictated also by the sense of guilt. In this case, the self -punishment 212 SADISM AND MASOCHISM makes possible the reproduction of a childhood scene which had exercised a decisive influence upon the patient's Hfe. Probably other cases would offer a similar motivation. We shall find again and again a torturing consciousness of guilt as the source of self-mutilation, dictating severe punishment ac- cording to the law of talion. The patient thus combines in one ")erson judge, accused, and executioner. XVI ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHIST Nature does not know vice. It is education which has in- vented it. Camille Mauclair. The analyst has repeated opportunity to observe how the will to be sick makes the analytic work of no effect. It is precisely the masochistic paraphilias which betray to us the deceptive double game of the patient. The latter begs in moving tones of distress for health and fears he might be compelled through analysis to give up his former attitudes. The resistance against the cure begins to act even on the first day of treatment. It already shows itself in the tendency to put off the treatment as long as possible. Only the smallest number of the sadomaso- chists who visit me and beg and implore me for help come for analysis. These patients usually plead pressing professional duties, want of money, lack of time, and so on, and postpone the time of the analysis. They express at the very beginning their doubt of the possibility of cure. Nothing can help them. They thus disclose the will to illness. Naturally they are very ready to believe in an organic disturbance. They blame heredi- tary conditions, discover similar cases among their relatives, and seize with enthusiasm every therapeutic suggestion which lies outside analysis. Investigation into their history then shows that they have avoided in life the opportunities to become normal. Their passion is described as physical love and they are fond of asserting that they are not capable of any other love. Or they find themselves forever searching for the partner who shall free them from the *'hell of the paraphilia.'' If they have found this partner, they begin to depreciate such a one and at- tempt to suppress the love in the germ. If they do not succeed, they take to flight or arrange misunderstandings, quarrels, or 213 214 SADISM AND MASOCHISM are even ready to play the part of fate and bring about a sepa- ration, which is portrayed as a special misfortune. Most of these patients are incapable of psychic love but are consumed with desire for such a love. They protect themselves 'through the oddest feelings of inferiority. How would it be possible that a pure girl should love them? How could they have the right to drag an ideal creature into the filth of their sexuality? A facultative impotence is willingly constructed, which forces the bearer into the paraphilia, since the other road seems barred. This inability for psychic love, or this flight from psychic love, is a characteristic symptom which seems to be wanting in no case. The causes of the inability to love lie at hand. In all these cases a fixation upon an infantile ideal may be demon- strated. The mixture of sadomasochism with symptoms of the ob- sessive parapathy is worthy of note. The characteristic death clause of the obsessive parapathy is concealed and masked as superstition. The attitude toward life is always pronouncedly bipolar. That splitting into two personalities which the ob- sessive parapathy so dramatically configures reveals itself also in these cases. The attitude toward parents and brothers and sisters is bipolar. This bipolar attitude leads to doubt and dis- trust. Nothing is certain, everything is vacillating; the para- philiac situation seems to be the only stable pole amid fleeting manifestations. The following case affords us a pure culture of the phenomena discussed and is in several respects exceed- ingly instructive. Case Number 40. Mr. Ladislaus K., a merchant, thirty-eight years of age, consulted me because of impotence. I discover in the course of the discussion that he is an extreme masochist. He is enthusiastic over stout women whose buttocks are well formed. He would like to debase himself before these women and perform for them the most humble services they could command. He allows himself to be flagellated and comes thereby to ejaculation or can then achieve coitus. Without preceding masochistic scenes he is absolutely impotent. With tender women he is a priori im- potent. Analytic treatment is recommended to him. He points out the impossibility of coming to Vienna (he is a Pole) and ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHIST 215 postpones the treatment until a later time. I receive from him after four months, before entering upon the treatment, the fol- lowing very characteristic letter : The genesis of my later erotic life lies perhaps in the age during the early years of indiscretion. A certain shame, if not fear, of strongly developed women. Masturbation began in the sixteenth year. Object of fantasy: a strong, good-looking w^oman vi^hom I often sp.w and v^^hose buttocks I always observed. In my fantasy I performed for this woman, belonging — I mention in passing — to a family of some importance, menial services which related chiefly to anal erotism. Moderate onanism, often not for weeks ; never twice a day ! From this time forth there existed for me a fetish in the form of well-developed feminine buttocks. I had relations {not sexual!) with young girls without erotic thoughts; rather, somewhat shy. Mask: either sullen visage or uncivil behavior. At nineteen first coitus with a prostitute. Erection only with manual support of the woman. Next coitus fourteen days later. Independent erection. Fantasy excluded. Onanism becomes less frequent. The morbid fantasy revived whenever I saw a "suit- ably" corpulent woman. Motive as above. At the third or fourth coitus with a prostitute erection took place strongly without assist- ance. Coitus normal — but accompanied with results. I was much too little "enlightened" and had perhaps acquired a gonorrhea — without knowing it. I have overcome some "smarting" in the urethra. I do not recall a discharge. I performed onanism off and on, until suddenly after a fall from a wagon — this was almost two months after that coitus — I suffered inflammation of the left testicle. Therapy : ice bag. Here ends the first phase — onanism, even if not all the time. I have become still more bashful than formerly. The Hyhris of the bad erotism continues its work. Women with well-de- veloped forms are the field of my further fantasy. I read Dr. Retau's Selbsthewahrung [Sclf-presei'vation] and was treated by letter from Leipzig with pills (camphor). Sexually, completely indifferent. I forcibly repress the masochistic thoughts, come off and on into the hand of an advertising female masochist. Thus it goes for almost a year and a half. Suddenly I have a discharge. Consult a doctor. Diagnosis : gonorrhea. — I have had no sexual intercourse for a year and a day ! ! Protargol, pills, and so forth. Result : pain in the prostate. Therapy : massage. Total result : neurasthenia simplex — cold-water cure. Further sexual absti- SADISM AND MASOCHISM nence. After almost two years I again force myself to coitus — with a prostitute. Great preparations ! Parturiunt monies. ... I have had coitus — I come off conqueror — afterward consider- ing the price! The second time it is difficult — the third time — failure! Age: twenty-two. The specter of the *'old eros makes itself felt, but I am, although only apparently — stronger. I sup- press with force the "certain thoughts" as long as all goes smoothly. Again I am thrown back. Two women from the Vienna street life have bewitched my fantasy, and at twenty-three I am almost where I stopped at twenty. To be sure, I have what might be called normal intercourse with prostitutes, while my fantasy remains before and afterward morbid. I must interpolate here that I had nervous states (insomnia, exhaustion, and the Hke) in the period of my complete sexual abstinence and the various quack treatments. Nothing, however, so annoyed me as the circumstance that one day I could not urinate before some acquaintances. This condition has lasted unfortunately until to-day — that is, fifteen years — and is painful to me. To avoid prolixity I will pass over to the third phase of my sexual life; that is, the one where the "fantasy" gradually became fact. I began to handle the buttocks like the face. I have per- formed menial services for strikingly strong and good-looking prostitutes, yet have never sunken so low as perhaps to taste feces or urine. There are intervals of months where I have apparently lost the masochistic impulses, yet they appear again, chiefly when in an ill humor called forth by some chance event. About ten months ago I spent the night in a hotel and had as neighbors a pair of lovers or a young married couple. I heard the woman moaning and had erections, thought of myself in the man's situation, and should have been able to perform coitus on the spot. This night was my fate. I have done nothing but practice onanism (with masochistic fantasies), after refraining for years. This case remained unique! A month later I learned to know a prostitute who saw through me and whose **slave" I became, as Sacher-Masoch repeatedly describes it. I shudder in writing! Here my excitement reached its high peak. This pros- titute bewitched me ! I could not wait to be with her. I will de- scribe the procedure : I came ; she assumed the pose of ''mistress." I licked her entire body, chiefly the buttocks, even the anus ; then I performed coitus. For two months I have not seen the prosti- tute, have since then had "normal" coitus with "an adapted fantasy text." ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHIST 217 I have become calmer ; that is, now in beginning the writing. Much as I am still drawn to-day to the paraphilias, I always feel afterward disgust and loathing of myself. Normal, pretty girls please me very well ; I have been almost happy when I have had a dream with normal erotic experience and a discharge following it. But that has been very seldom ! I have felt equally unhappy after an absurd perverse dream. Such dreams, too, have been rare. At present I am afflicted with a heart affection, which surely has nothing to do with my erotism. I want to know from a conscientious physician just this : Whether I can have normal sexual feeling in order then to be able to marry. Or if I am too old for that and must resign myself, I would also be satisfied with that. I fear nothing more than "airy castles" and disillusionments ! I want the truth ; I believe I am strong enough to bear the truth. I would a thousand times rather hear that my condition will not change appreciably than the opposite, if future events should give the lie to the latter prognosis. This letter shows us already, just as does the putting off of the treatment, a gesture of doubt and distrust. He is afraid of disillusionment, as he fears every defeat. The style is rather affected; the expression Hyhris is v^rongly used (Hybris the goddess of wanton mischief. To be sure, he is a hybrid. . . .) The life history is cursory and needs filling out in important places. His heart disease reveals itself as a cardiac parapathy. The heart is organically thoroughly sound. He is robust, blooming in appearance, a man of pycnic habitus. The face has constantly an expression of being on the watch, observing. He begins his treatment with a pessimistic description of his condition. He is the most unhappy man in the world ; he is a candidate for suicide ; he has no right to live. His only enjoyment has been smoking, and his physician has forbidden that. In contrast to this tale of woe is the smiling expression of his face, which resembles that of hypochondriacs when they make merry over the physician. He designates as the misfortune of his life the sad fact that he cannot be potent with the women he loves if they do not provide a massive hinder part. His psychic ideal would be the 2l8 SADISM AND MASOCHISM delicate woman, while the portly ones arouse all the animal in» stincts. It is plain, however, that this distinction is an artificial con- struction and that he is professing an inability for love which is really not present. He flees from love. We have proof of this. His last and strongest love occurred three years ago. There was a stenotypist in his place of business, who was not of his type. She was slender, but very attractive, vivacious and quick-witted. He fell in love with her; she returned his love. He had strong erections in kissing her, even in only touching her body slightly. He decided to marry this girl. Now came a difficult period. Although he loved the girl warmly, he be- came gruff, sullen, sought occasion for quarrels, and finally withdrew the position and his friendship from her. After the break, a depression that continued for three months. The masochistic ideas had completely disappeared during this spring of love. He had only normal fantasies of desire in connection with the girl. Although the girl suited him in every respect, because they had the same mental interests, he made use of his paraphilia to overrule these. **What do you see in this girl?" he said to himself; *'you will still be impotent with her, for she is slender and delicate." He makes an end of every relationship with the aid of his ostensible impotence. Not even the painful erections in the girl's proximity could convince him that in this case he would be potent. Two years previously he had been in love with the wife of a cousin and business friend. This cousin was his second ego. He asked his advice in all situations in life; looked up to him as to an ideal, because he was an energetic, strong-willed man who had married in opposition to his family's wish and been very happy. One time he took his friend's wife to the theater. They had a very stimulating conversation. He overcame his sense of inferiority, spoke of his artistic views, and found an appreciative, sympathetic soul. At parting the woman held his hand a long time in hers, looked him deeply in the eyes, and said : 'Tt has been a very lovely evening ! I should like to see you again soon, as soon as possible." He felt at this mo- ment that he loved the woman passionately and knew that she ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHISl 219 was well disposed to him. He knew that he could win het without difficulty. Despite his passion, he was in despair. How could he deceive his cousin and friend! How could he enter into a relation with a married woman! He ran to law- yers, doctors, friends, and asked their advice, how a man should behave in such a situation. His despair reached its highest point as he once looked from behind and her full figure provoked in him a violent erection. He became so nervous in consequence of the internal struggle that he had to go to a hydropathic establishment. He could not forget the charming woman. Day and night her image pur- sued him, the look of longing in her wonderfully beautiful eyes, the warmth of pressure in her hands. He resorted to his old trick. He provoked a quarrel and played the part of the injured one, explained that he was so hurt that he no longer wanted to see her and talk with her. He saw his cousin only at business and never in his home. He mentions a third adventure, through which he passed dur- ing the period of the war. He lived with a woman whose hus- band was in the field. She even came to his bed. Neverthe- less, he had the force to resist, ostensibly from fear of disgrace. He was brought up very religiously and fears scandal. He could not survive a scandal. He puts much weight on what people say, believes that they are looking at him and laughing at him ; he shovv^s a stupid countenance, and so on. . . . He states, when questioned as to the first impression which brought him to the paraphilia, that when he was ten years old he saw his mother naked from behind and was astonished at the size of her nates. Also, he used to strike his sister about two years younger upon the buttocks. He was a spoiled child ; inasmuch as three brothers had died before him, they trembled for his life. His mother took him to bed with her as long as he was small. When he grew larger, he sometimes produced states of fear so that he would be taken into bed again. He loves his mother passionately and yet is unreasonably in- censed at her. As a boy he sought ridiculous excuses that he might be angry with his mother. He had the fixed idea that SADISM AND MASOCHISM she deprived him of something. For example, he would find the coffee bitter, believed his mother had a special kind of butter for herself, that she secretly ate sweets hidden away. He would growl at her fearfully. His sister had, in contrast to him, an earnest temperament. She rejected all proposals, was now an old maid. The obsessive sexual thoughts gave him never a moment of peace. n he had done a good stroke of business, he would think: **0f what use to you is money; you are still an unhappy person ; you cannot lie with a woman you love, you merely run after stout women; you are merely indulging your animal desires!" He reproaches himself the whole day long and is always dissatisfied with himself. He comes to the treatment ever in a state of doubt. Whether such a person can be cured ? Whether he is not a wretched de- generate ? After long hesitation he confesses a dream which displays all the signs of transference (primitive reaction). I am lying in bed with Dr. Stekel and have a pollution. I think to myself, now I shall know whether I will ever have chil- dren. ... He wakens and has no pollution. He believes he will have no children ; his semen never comes out normally, and it has a peculiar consistency. H he has intercourse with a prostitute, he has a very severe cramp simultaneously with the orgasm. There comes only a small drop and afterward while washing the real semen runs out. He formerly would squeeze the organ in the middle in onanism so that the semen should not come out.^ It grieves him very much that he cannot urinate before others. Sometimes he cannot urinate in a public urinal even if he is alone. If he is urinating and an acquaintance comes near, the urination stops and he experiences a severe burning. His masochism had its beginning in his sixteenth year. There was in his native city a very buxom woman, built like an Amazon. He was told that her husband surprised her in unfaithfulness and in his anger threw a slipper after her. This ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHIST 221 story excited him very much. His fantasy elaborated the scene in countless variations. One time he was walking on the street behind her. The thought came to him of kissing her buttocks, wiping her at defecation, performing anilingus upon her, and so on. He was then conscious of his masochism for the first time. Maso- chistic literature brought him ever deeper into the thicket of masochism. He even went as far in his fantasies as coproph- agy. At the same time he was dominated by the longing for a pure girl, who should deliver him from his paraphilia through a normal coitus. To his misfortune he met in the brothel at A. an experienced prostitute ''Rosa," ^ who knew immediately how to treat him as a masochist. She bid him energetically to perform anilingus for her ; she insulted him in obscene fashion, continued this behavior during coitus. He was completely under her spell. He once made a journey of twenty-four hours to reach her and intended to carry out the masochistic procedure twice this time. But after the first time he felt so wretchedly that he had to go to a hotel ; he suf- fered a severe heart attack, which the physician did not recog- nize as an anxiety attack, or he certainly would not have made the diagnosis ''dilatation of the heart" and treated him with injections of caffeine. Since that time he has suffered a severe cardiac parapathy. It is plainly a case of reaction of his moral ego. He has suffered since childhood from an obsessive laugh- ing, which has often brought him into the most painful situa- tions. He was once on the point of being prosecuted on account of a religious disturbance, because he laughed out loudly during worship. (This shows us the attitude of the rebel, which is contrary to the superficial picture of the "slave.") For some weeks he has had violent pains in the left hand, which radiate from the heart. A physician confirmed a very high blood pressure, ordered a strict diet, and forbade him to smoke. Then he went to a Rontgenologist, who could not es- tablish anything organic and advised him to consult m^e. Thereupon he recalled our first consultation and decided to come to Vienna. SADISM AND MASOCHISM To-day the pains are stronger again and "he cannot stand it much longer." The pain appears most severely upon moving. He had two dreams : I see a blue silk carpet and think this will be best for Os. . . . As if the carpet had to be exchanged. . . . I am in a dwelling. There are two prostitutes. I can do noth- ing with the first. The second sits upon me with her buttocks turned toward me; she sits upon my erected penis. She dragged me about in this position on the floor. I had to kiss her leg. It occurs to him with the first dream that *'light blue" is his favorite color. All blue attracts him. His clothes in child- hood were blue, and blue is the color of the sky. His associa- tion with Os is a river by Baden-Baden. He is reading now a novel Die blonde Gefahr [The Blonde Peril] which has to do with three blonde girls who are dangerous to every man, so that they are called the blonde peril. The story is laid partly in Baden-Baden. He associates with Os Rosa also, the name of the three prostitutes who were dangerous to him and occupied his fantasy to a great extent. He knows every house of ill fame in the cities where he has stopped. In Vienna he has visited the brothel ''Madame Rosa." He enters upon an "exchange" in every house. He substitutes for the prostitute a fantasy figure. His favorite fantasy is: He is a servant to a personage in high position, for example, a count. The latter compels him to have intercourse with a hateful female (daughter, sister, wife, of the count). For a long time he carried on this fantasy in relation to the Archduchess J. She was a very strong woman and said to be very imperious. He wanted to serve her as slave. Many a prostitute became in his fantasy the Archduchess J. He brings, also, much material with the second dream. The first prostitute was too quiet for him. The second was pas- sionate. When he was twenty-three, he kissed a prostitute upon the buttocks for the first time. It happened like this. When he was twenty-one he read Retau's Selbstbewahrung [Self-preservation] and was afraid of ruining himself through ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHISI 223 onanism. He resolved to give up onanism and for two years lived completely abstinent. Then he met a prostitute in the Prater in Vienna, with whom he had perfectly normal coitus. This was the greatest triumph of his life ! But the second time, after a few days, his potency was already weaker, and the third time he failed utterly. Now followed another ascetic period of three months. After this he became acquainted with a buxom prostitute who seated herself upon his member and produced a great orgasm in him. One time he sat in the theater next to a well-formed woman. He was so excited that he had to leave the theater and hasten to the prostitute just mentioned. In his frenzy, he kissed her this time upon the buttocks, imagining to himself the woman at the theater. The connections with oral sexuality are plain. He knows Latin and recognizes Os as the mouth. Further determinants go to the bath {Badi (Baden-Baden), but these associations lead to a no more certain trail. When he loves, he is madly jealous. He also guards him- self from normal coitus through fear of pregnancy, of evil rumor, legal processes, and so on. He dreams also once or twice a year of normal coitus. After such a dream he feels as if "newborn." The succeeding days are festive days for him. He never had paraphiliac dreams in earlier years. Only later did the paraphilia press into his dream life. One physician advised him, when he implored help against his paraphiliac dreams, to read my book Die Sprache des Traumes [The Language of the Dream] (an absurd piece of advice!). He dreamed the first day after reading it: I am at a circus. A very beautiful blonde girl is to perform feats. She is strapped upon a horse. At the moment that she leaves the horse and flies through the air, I have a horrible fear that she might fall, and I run away. ... He finished reading the bulky volume in three days. The death symbolism especially (interpretation of this old dream later ! ) excited him very greatly. He dreamed last night : SADISM AND MASOCHISM It is like a drill. Horses run about with flayed skin. I cry out: Moritiiri te salutant, Ccesar! — Then one horse after another is laid upon a block and his head cut off. I will pass over the deeper determination of the two dreams and point out merely the relations to his paraphilia. The latter is symbolized as a horse. He is strapped to this horse (his impulse). He cannot imagine his life without this illness. We see the function of his paraphilia as self -protection. Analy- sis is performed in the second dream (drawing off the skin so that what is within becomes visible) and one fantasy (horse) after the other slain. We observe, further, the first indications of a sadism, which will probably soon come to light. A child fantasy occurs to him in connection with the first dream. The emperor is looking out of a window while he is swinging upon a high swing. Swinging is a great means of enjoyment even to-day. Railway travel produces pleasurable sensations. He is glad for every trip on the railway. He has strange thoughts before going to sleep. How would it be if when you awake to-morrow morning your parents should be dead? . . . He admits for the first time sadistic traits. He also reaches erection and orgasm when he beats the prostitute. He is often rough in business and sometimes toward his parents. He resolves not to irritate them but to represent a certain event as different. Then he relates it in quite unadorned fashion, so that his parents are greatly excited, and he later reproaches himself for it. He tortured his sweet- heart, the stenotypist, in crudest manner. If he loves, he be- comes cruel. He can be gentle with prostitutes, because they are objects of indifference to him. He does not smoke at present. But he misses it. Smoking gave him the fiction that he was a man. He has to smoke on the street after a masochistic procedure with a prostitute, otherwise it would be noticed that he is a masochist. Masochism is to him something feminine. He cannot be a man. If he knew that he could show himself a man to girls, he would perhaps be able to give up prostitutes. He is a masochist because he be- lieves that he would be impotent with "respectable" girls. ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHIST 225 He feels himself completely isolated. He cannot bear to have sexual allusions made in society. He becomes pale, stammers, so that he thinks the people recognize that there is something rotten in his mind. So it does not please him if a man tells a joke in company. (It is the greatest perversity if a woman boasts of her Popo [buttocks]. The word Popo makes him turn white and he is discomposed. He avoids all words which contain the syllables popo (po-et, po-pular, po-lar, and so on). With this he has a mania for writing any number of times the word Popo or forming long sentences in thought, in which the fascinating word appears with countless attributes. He has confirmed the fact that educated persons say many more filthy things than uneducated. This makes every society impossible to him. The uneducated bore him, and the educated he fears for the reason mentioned. The result is that he is a hermit. He is afraid of mice and especially of rats. After the experi- ence with the cousin's wife, he had the hallucination of a mouse and could not sleep all night from fear. - His nurse was very stout. He considers his nurse and his mother his infantile models. He attributes great significance to one experience (fourteen). He was walking with a friend outside the city. They saw an exceedingly fat gypsy. His friend said : **You could sit on her A — !" This idea began to pursue him. He elaborated an anus fantasy: He would meet a husky woman and she would put him without ado into her anus. Naturally, as a child he believed that children were defecated from the anus. ... He therefore suffers a modification of the fantasy of the mother's womb. He finds himself in the female anus. He goes home every week for two days. Ostensibly, for busi- ness reasons ; actually, because he cannot live without his family. He therefore spends two nights in the parental home. He suffered nightmare during these two nights and screamed so loudly in his sleep that his mother heard it. She came to his bed and woke him. He can not recall the first dream. He dreamed the second time that his father slowly approached his bed. At this moment he screamed. It was really no cry. He could hear it himself. It was as if a cat had miaowed. He heard his mother say: "Now he is screaming as he did last night,'* and yet he could not stop. 226 SADISM AND MASOCHISM He is questioned whether his father had ever threatened him with castration. He denies it. After thinking a while he states that his father had the habit of playing with little boys, and that he would reach after the genital with a gesture which might mean : **Now I will take that away from you He saw him playing that way with his younger brother (who is dead). The father may have played with him, too, in this manner. After the nightmare dream, he has a second dream : I was in Wiesbaden with a friend from Berlin. It was in a cafe restaurant. My friend had a dispute (with the musicians). He was very energetic. I seemed to myself like a miserable no-, body (a sorry thing). All at once there came a waiter (serving man?) with two dirty, worn admission cards. The colleague spoke harshly to him: "I will give you two good slaps!" (perhaps he slapped him). He looked at me as if to say : "That is the way a man behaves !" — I seemed to myself like a nobody. The colleague is a strong, very enterprising man, who has a rela- tion with the wife of his director ( !). In the dream he was about ten heads taller than the patient. This colleague had once (four- teen) practiced onanism before him and boasted that he did it four times a day. In spite of this he is now a healthy and a highly potent fellow, while the patient himself feels miserably impotent. This colleague represents in the dream his ideal ego. He wotJd like to appear like him and be able to conduct himself thus: a complete man. He feels himself a child. He trembles even to-day before his father, with whom he cannot establish a good relation- ship. The father has never shown any concern for him. He reproaches his father in his thoughts as responsible for his illness. At times he feels hatred toward the man who begot him. The father is a strange man. He will often not say a word for days. Then he will suddenly roar like a wild beast. The colleague re- veals himself therefore as a father imago. The mother reproaches the father gently. "You act as if your son were still a little lad of fourteen!" Moreover, this "lad" has brought the business to its high position, which the father does not want to acknowledge. He is jealous of his son's success. His mother is the opposite of his father. She is a patient sufferer and has often said that the father was an "unfeeling man.'' ("I have had a difficult time with him.") Four brothers and sisters died before he was born, one afterward. He has often puzzled his head as to who was to blame for their death. The parents are related by blood. Perhaps this was the cause. He is dominated by a constant yearning for love. ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHIST 227 He has found love only with his mother. As a boy he cried all day when he had to leave his parents' home. His whole affection belongs to his family. Nevertheless, his being at home is often a torture, because there is tension between him and his father, which sometimes escapes in feelings of hate, followed by passionate thoughts of revenge. He has had a fearful evening. He felt himself lost and struggled with suicidal ideas. His hand pained him horribly. (Evidently he reproached himself because of his accusations against his father.) He comes again to speak of the father. He believes that the father did not want to see him. He certainly did not grieve over the loss of the children. He is a money man. He begins to tell of his studies. He was considered a prodigy. Every one thought he had to be a scholar. So at ten he went to school at P. The parting from his mother was very hard. In school he was lazy and inattentive, so that at the age of fourteen he failed in the fourth class at the gymnasium. He had a depress- ing sense of inferiority. Then he went to the commercial school. The experience with the stout woman and the fantasy attached to her of cleaning the anus belong to this period. Onanism began here and with it a significant improvement in his condition. He be- came suddenly the best in the class. He buried himself in Faust and showed at the time an inclination toward mysticism. He also commenced to smoke. Gradually there began a struggle against the masochistic fantasies, against smoking and onanism. He revealed a distinct change in character. He became cowardly, began to blush and to stammer. At the same time he took delight in lying and carrying out small deceptions. The obsessive laughing was also becoming stronger. (There set in evidently a fight over the feeling of superiority.) Again a typical dream : I was with a business friend, who received me very coolly. A prosperous-looking young man (his partner) told him something about a purchase. I was envious. They talked of the business. It had to do with a case of eggs or yeast. "We will then look after this together !" said the business friend. I seemed to be wretched. The merchant is a well-known libertine. The merchant's partner represents his ''ideal ego." The business friend is his paraphiHac ego. He compares himself with the young man (his ideal) and seems to himself very small. The yeast is for growth (anagogic 228 SADISM AND MASOCHISM tendency) » : But he wants to do the business "together." He does not want to give up his paraphilia. He knows but one place where he feels secure and hidden : bed. The bed is his fortress. He takes refuge in bed when things go badly with him. He is afraid of people. He believes that he has a dissolute face. If he is unhappy he comforts himself by eating. He then becomes a gormandizer. Thus he forgets his unhappiness. He thinks that every one is laughing at him. He has such a bash- ful look. Watchmen observe him because he behaves so strikingly (paranoid delusions). His sleep is wretched. At home he woke up perhaps ten times. Now here in Vienna, since he is being analyzed, he sleeps splendidly (incestuous impulse as disturber of sleep?). He cannot kiss the hand. He considers this as a sexual act and becomes embarrassed. His mother has very strict moral views. He manifested an early-developed sexual instinct. At five he wanted to marry his aunt. He said then : *T cannot marry you. Every brother must marry his sister." He and his sister often played parents and had in their play children like father and mother. Sometimes they struck each other. He is absurdly superstitious; Friday and the thirteenth are naturally unlucky days. If the left eye itches, it denotes good luck; if the right eye, bad luck. He is very awkward with girls, can never find by himself the entrance to the vagina. He did not trust himself to perform coitus with a "better" girl ; he would surely have been impotent, he believes. As a result, he was driven to prostitutes. A blonde prostitute called Kamilla pleased him best; he had intercourse with her several times normally. Then she asked him to kiss her on the nates. He acted as if frightfully offended and left. The next day he visited her again, but could not find her. At that time he still had the power of resistance; now he is completely in the claws of the prostitutes. They know his passion. He waits on them, carries out their chambers, allows them to insult him. With the illusion of being their servant and slave, he falls into sexual ecstasy. He dreamed: I broke my walking stick, did not know what to do, and wanted to have the stick cut off. I came to an old woman whose ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHIST 229 son wanted to do it. She laughed at me. I thought it was too bad about the beautiful cane; perhaps I could have it put to- gether again. He had bought a fine stick a few days before, recommended to him as mahogany. In the dream it was an ordinary piece of wood, whitish green within like hazel. The connection with his potency is plain; he has questioned whether I (represented here as an old woman) will be able to cure his impotence. Asked again about the castration complex, he first denies it and then admits that he has had a remarkable fantasy which has repeatedly engaged his at- tention. He is a eunuch in a harem. A wonderfully beautiful girl is brought to an old and ugly sultan. He has to undress her and lead her to the latter. At the moment when the aged sultan forces the beautiful girl to his will, he has an orgasm with onanism. All the stories of rape in the war excited him very much. He has one more recollection which is connected with the castration complex (eighth year). He was playing in the bath with his member when his mother said, '*If you do that your member will come off and you will die like your uncle Ottokar.'* This uncle Ottokar was a legendary person and occupied his fantasy very much. He passes from castration by way of circumcision to the Jewish complex. He has suffered very much from anti-Semitism. Christians seem to him like gods. He has his masochistic fantasies with Christians. He also wants to serve only Chris- tians. Once he had intercourse with a prostitute who pleased him very much and for whom he performed every masochistic service. After she told him that she was a Jewess he never came to her again. His father is a bigoted, devout Jew. The patient still shows a rudiment of religiousness. He keeps certain feast days and fasts on the Day of Atonement. Sexual scenes often occur to him precisely on this day. Thus he sees on the Day of Atonement in his ideas of penitence a beautiful naked woman who disrobes in the canopy bed. Father and sister seem to him on such days as sexual beings, while he tries at other times to asexualize them. He has to admit that strong fixations are present in his family. The sister depends greatly upon the father, he upon the mother. Morbid, also, is his reverence for the imperial house. Emperor, father, God, form an authority complex, to which he has a bipolar attitude. Just as on the Day of Atonement he insults the Deity through sexual pictures, so he has degraded the father SADISM AND MASOCHISM to a sexual object. He sees clearly that his sister is fixed upon the father; he feels his fixation upon the mother, but he is psy- chically blind to his fixation upon the father and sister. In the dream he acknowledges that he has shattered his manhood. He will not become entirely well ; he will only stick the cane together. (The cane is also a symbol of his parapathy.) To-day he is greatly depressed. He had a hideous dream : I was with a prostitute. She seated herself with her buttocks upon my face ; I was to kiss and lick them. I awoke in terror and with violent erection. Was awake for half an hour. Then the same dream continued. It reached a pollution. I awoke again. I felt shame and physical pain. I cannot recall the prostitute's face. He was with his old family physician, who had forbidden his smoking, and told him that Dr. Stekel permitted him to smoke and that he had ''only'* a cardiac neurosis. The doctor discovered that his blood pressure had improved from 175 to 135 ; this improve- ment was a result of nicotine abstinence, and he read him a long lecture about the harm of nicotine to the capillary vessels. He absolutely must not smoke ! He is naturally shaken again in his faith in my art and doubts that I shall be able to cure him. He relates a series of different occurrences which all show that he himself has staged his humilia- tions and defeats. He thus arranged his doubt also by visiting the family physician. He always has infinite pity for himself. If he hears music, he is moved and has to restrain his tears. His mother was once a good singer, but his father would not tolerate having any one sing in the house. Singing was a crime. We will return to the woman in the last dream. I ask him to give associations with the woman whose face he did not see. He hesitates a long time. Then there occurs to him the ''first" woman with whom he had paraphiliac excitement. From this first woman he comes to speak of a woman with brown hair and finally, in a roundabout way, of his mother. He has the need of sharing every pleasure with his mother. Even with prostitutes, he often has to think of his mother. "What would my mother say if she were to see me?" Or: "Would you have coitus if your mother were now dving:?" In short, he is always seeking some indirect way to think of his mother. He was fixed upon his mother even as a child. He always ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHIST 231 wanted to sleep with her. In his sleep he often moved down so that he touched her on her back. He resolved as a boy never to marry, for he could never love any woman as he loved his mother. When he was in love with the girl, he noticed with terror that he had forgotten his family. Otherwise his sister's birthday was an important event for him. He was weeks selecting her present. This time he bought her a parasol in haste without giv- ing it consideration. During this period he seldom wrote to his mother. Therefore he gave up the relationship. He felt his love to his mother and sister disappearing. This was a thought which he could not bear. He always finds a bridge to the mother complex. If he sees a dashing young fellow, he thinks obsessively : "His mother must have smart buttocks He had a dream ten years ago, of which he still thinks with horror. He saw himself as a poor old bachelor with glasses, drinking coffee all alone and living upon the mercy of others. The same night he saw himself alone upon a high mountain and heard a voice : "This is the day !" He shuddered at that time at the thought of being left alone and decided that if his parents died he would share life with his sister. She would likewise be single, and they could live together. His sexual plan of life is closely bound with his sister. He dreamed : I had my chin operated upon. A nurse was present. The doc- tor took a paper cup, such as are used with beer pitchers, and put it on the chin. He said : "The little fellow will be good. This must not be taken away/' The nurse said : "That will heal." It was not to be pulled off. An uncle was there. I was very much pleased that the nurse praised me and thought I was a brave boy. In the dream he is again a child. The thing with which he was bandaged looked like a sponge. He also heard at the operation the words : "The little fellow will be brave and will behave nicely." The relation to the analysis is plain. I am to bandage him, and he will not tear off the bandage. Bipolar tendency: to keep the parapathy (protective binding) and not renounce the infantilism. Circumcision ^ occurs to him in association with operation. He often betrays the wish for castration when he says : "It would be better if I had no testicles f* The operation reminds him of lather- ing for shaving. SADISM AND MASOCHISM The associations with operation go back to his childhood. He was a delicate child and very much pampered. A number of girls and women vied in caring for him, called for him, went walking with him, contended for his love, and so on. Now follows important information as to the psychogenesis of his paraphilia. He remembers first (four to six) a buxom, blonde girl named Rosa. The prototype of all blondes. She taught him to speak words backward. Thus he knows that he said Opop for Popo. She played with him, and he has a definite recollection that she misused him for her sexual excitement. Then a second Rosa comes to his mind (seven to eight), who was always giving him sweets. This was the daughter of a man who had ruined his father in business. She ended later as a notori- ous woman of the world. She was sexually paraphiliac even at that time, and it seems that this girl, too, used the handsome wide- awake boy for her own purposes. His ideal between eleven and twelve was a coarse woman of fifty. He imagined her naked in the closet, where in fantasy he kissed her buttocks during defecation. She was a Christian. The subjection to a Christian woman appeared first at that time. He had a brother also (ten). He used to shake him in his cradle and torment him. The boy died by accident. He makes a significant statement : *T do not know whether I am my brother's murderer. . . Another brother born later died shortly after birth. Things are very bad with him to-day. He has **birth pangs,'* trembles all over during his confessions, feels like vomiting. He says then: "Anilingus is the only perversion that gives me com- plete satisfaction." Finally he remembers Rosa III, the buxom girl whom he addressed as Miss. Her mother said : "You may say Madame to her." That excited him wonderfully. The dream also shows clearly relation to the sister complex ("This must not be taken away"). He goes home as usual on Saturday. He cannot explain the following phenomenon. He feels very well on the journey upon the train. He talks with two women. Not until one of them stooped and he saw her imposing buttocks did the old fantasies reappear, of which he soon became master. He left the train to go home. At this moment his heart began to beat violently ; he felt tired and exhausted ; his knees trembled ; he could scarcely climb the stairs that lead to his dwelling. His small traveling bag seemed terribly heavy, his hand pained him. ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHIST 233 He is afraid that his sister has some intimation that he is being treated for a paraphilia. His mother, too, seems to know some- thing. His father greeted him so coolly that there was a crash soon. His mother is jealous. His sister spies upon him. At the time of his sole love affair, she had found a note in his pocket and told his mother of it, who then did not fail to warn him. It was after this that he began to treat the girl badly and drove her from the shop. He was unhappy for months afterward and wept on every occasion. Her place might not be taken nor her machine used by another typist. Thus he had interfered with his own recovery. He had sacri- ficed his love to his mother and his sister. He had not a single morbid thought during the period of his love (six months) I He dreamed : I was in a coupe with a dark girl (or woman). I was very awk- ward. I wanted to be courteous, but whatever I said was so tactless that the woman was offended. She exclaimed in the mean- time: "I remonstrate! This is an outrage! You will have to atone for this!" We dismounted and were in a garden. Her attorney (or her father) was also there, to whom she related the whole story to the minutest detail. I was afraid. I had indeed meant well. But she interpreted it all badly. I feared being im- prisoned for three months. He is actually afraid of his awkwardness. A traveling acquaint- ance furnished the occasion for the dream. A woman invited him to visit her. Of what use is this conquest, which seemed so im- probable to him — like a dream — if he is impotent? The meaning of the dream tends to show that his fantasies force themselves into his speech. He would like always to be saying vulgar things, making sexual allusions, which his moral ego forbids, so that he prefers to keep silence. Further associations lead to the mother, of whom he says that she is easily offended. He comes to me in a disheartened mood. On the way he felt again the pain in his hand and had palpitations of the heart. Be- sides, he is seized with frequent need to urinate. He wanted to urinate in a public urinal. He could not. He tried to force him- self and could produce only a few drops. In the end there came a slimy mass. I suspect homosexual fantasies. At first he denies, then admits, SADISM AND MASOCHISM that he has at urination a slight burning and tickUng. He had previously been thinking why he had to lie down when with me. He first disafifirms homosexual attitudes, but has to acknowledge that as a student (seventeen) he had a remarkable experience. He was giving lessons to a handsome lad. Things were not going well. Then he took the boy one time upon his lap, thought of the boy's mother, who was one of his ideals at that time, and — per- formed onanism. The occurrence was repeated several times. He comes then to speak of his childish performances. He likes to go into an amusement park where there is a grotto railway. He can stand there by the hour watching the train go into the dark cave. It also excites him when the dragon devours the witches. Riding on the grotto train is pleasurably toned. This has to do with a uterine fantasy. The psychogenesis of his masochism becomes clear when one knows that he has valued his mother more highly than his father. The mother was well educated, played the piano, was of good family. The father was a simple person. And yet the mother was the father's willing slave. He differentiated himself from his father and thought : 'Tf I had such a wife, I would serve her and lick the dust from her feet!" Licking plays a great role in his life. He once had a disagree- able affair, when he in anger flung the citation from Gots von Berlichingen into the face of a higher official. He is enlightened as to the significance of his homosexual com- ponent. He comes to the session completely changed. He has passed through twenty-four hours without palpitation of the heart or pain in the hands. He was at the opera in the evening. His neigh- bor was a slender woman and pleased him exceptionally well, with- out his being burdened by the paraphiliac ideas. Then he thought : "Would you be potent if you married her?" And he answered himself : "No !" He has fearful anxiety concerning the bridal night. He would never survive a disgrace. He dreamed : I was in the theater. It was toward the end of the performance. The iron curtain came down unexpectedly. There was the still- ness of the grave in the theater. Some one said : "Probably we are being submerged." I thought: "Either there is a fire, or it is a political revolution." I was not excited. I wondered in the dream ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHISl 235 that my heart was not beating violently. I awoke and again won- dered that I had no palpitation. This dream shows that he wants to end the analysis. The iron curtain shall fall, and the memories shall sink away. . . . The bipolar tendency expresses itself in the second fantasy: He will fall in love, to which even the overture to the opera points, and there will be a revolution in his heart. The old kings will be dethroned. He is reticent in the analysis. He would like to marry if he could find a woman who would take the place for him of mother, sister, father, and the — analyst. Then he relates an occurrence in Berlin. He was carousing with a friend. They both tried to go into a room with a girl. He was to begin first and was impotent (resistance against the homosexual impulses). He had an excited day yesterday. He saw by chance upon the street an enormously stout woman. He immediately had the im- pulse to run after her and fantasy himself into her. He climbed into an automobile in order to save himself. He regarded this flight as a great victory over himself. Later he saw people he knew and ran from them, because he had a "ghastly" face. He calls this face a "dirtied" face. It comes to light that he identifies his face with buttocks. He lives in constant fear that something may have happened at home. If he is going home, he is tormented with the thought: ^Some one has died !" This some one is usually the father, some- times the mother or the sister. He sees only one possibility of freeing himself from his family: death. If the parents die, he will be free — and will remain alone with the sister. Thus his attitude toward the members of his family is bipolar. He then atones for his thoughts of hatred and denies himself what he strives for most: love. He had a good time with his people. First he visited a fatherly friend and told him that he is being analyzed. (He presumably was hoping that the man would advise him to stop the analysis.) The friend, the husband of the cousin mentioned, counseled him to go on with it. Then he had a rather important discussion with the sister. He asked her why she did not want to marry. She thought that was her aflfair ; he could marry ; she would not bind him. In the night he dreamed : I am at the railway station. A tradesman, tall, pale, with a 236 SADISM AND MASOCHISM black cap like Richard Wagner's, offers a case which is a sure means against sadism and masochism. I am embarrassed at first about buying it. Then I buy it. All the men in the coupe sit with such a case, which opens and then represents a book. His first association with the case is a silver case which is used as a wedding present (his sister's wedding?). With the man, Richard Wagner occurs to him and his favorite opera Tannhduscr. He is now, in fact, in the Venusberg. He is moved chiefly by the scene in which Tannhauser leaves the Venusberg and the shepherd pipes his spring song. — But he is accursed like Tannhauser. The man is death. His parents have to die, his sister must marry ; then he will be free. The case is also the coffin. . .j .. , He passes through a severe crisis. Every step has to be pon- dered, questioned, made with an effort of will. The picture of abulia comes more clearly into the open. He wants to separate himself from his parents and cannot do it. He is occupied in every decision with this important one. He dreamed twice and had two pollutions. He recalls the sec- ond dream: I was with a kind-hearted, well-bred prostitute. She had in the dream features like the picture which I have formed of my mother as she may have looked in her earlier years. Absolutely nothing would happen. Then she sat down upon the earth. I had to sit by her. Finally the erection took place. I felt ejacula- tion after a few moments and awoke. He associates scenes where he played on the ground as a child. Yesterday he r-^ceived a letter from his mother. It seemed to him cool and indifferent. He then wrote in the greatest excitement an insulting letter home. He was particularly vexed that his mother wrote of a consignee who owed money that his letters were empty. This expression irritated him, because he found her letter empty. He raises his right hand before going to sleep and stretches it toward the side of the bed. He seeks the mother and sister. If the hand and arm become weary, he is able to go to sleep (sym- bolic resolve always to do the right thing and to dream). He recalls (eight to nine) that he slept for a number of nights with the cousin, the older friend and counselor, in the same bed. Once he awoke and was very wet, but not from urine. He be- lieves that his cousin had a pollution. He was frightfully ashamed at the time and dared not look his cousin in the eyes. ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHIST 237 Now the theme concerns his mother. He praises her virtues and cannot understand that the mother was identified in the dream with a prostitute. A motivation for this association is still lack- ing. But this connection explains his wretchedness after inter- course with a prostitute. I go back to the Richard Wagner dream. I ask him what he knows of Wagner's life. He comes at once to speak of the Geyer hypothesis, that Wagner was not the son of his father but resembled the family friend, the painter Geyer. The dream before the last can be understood. All women are false and deceive their husbands. The heavy case, which changes into a book (book of life), contains the secret of his origin. I do not pursue this trail but wait for new material. He dreamed : I was in the company of friends in Vienna. The question was raised what was the German expression for "gas." I said BldJiun- gen [flatulence]. He suffers from flatulence. He seems to stage his heart at- tacks by means of aerophagy and is then distressed with flatulency. His father is given to frequent passing of flatus. Although he knows that the latter is an old man, he feels offended there- by. He seems to have a strange attitude toward flatus. He was once with a prostitute who produced flatus for his benefit. He pretended to be insulted, his libido disappeared, and he left. An- other prostitute did the same thing. The reaction was very dif- ferent. He had a remarkably strong erection and performed coitus with great satisfaction. All functions of the anus are objects of his fantasy. He has played with the fantasy of having defecation undertaken in his mouth. He identifies himself with the closet and envies the closet that it can see women. He would like to observe fat women def- ecating, but has never dared do it. He has often been told that he has large buttocks. This makes him very proud. He admires his nates before the glass and often smacks himself upon his hinder part ; likes also to caress it fondly (narcissism). His entire thinking is coprophiliac. There is a cake in Vienna which through a dividing depression reminds him of buttocks. He can never eat this cake. He was in the bath yesterday and douched his hinder parts so long that he almost lost consciousness. He had a wonderfully de- lightful feeling and wished the bath would last forever. 238 SADISM AND MASOCHISM During the entire day he is driven by his oniomania to buying all sorts of things. He bought himself under Hnen, suspenders, perfume, soap; in brief, he fitted himself out for an act of love. After buying he regretted his purchases, but while doing so he had a sense of pride (displacement of affect : he plays the part of a male prostitute). But he plays more than this. He plays with his face. He is always making the "dirtied face" in company. A slight allusion to sexuality and he is finished. Then at home he has an irreproach- able countenance. He compares his facial expression to that of a "stuck bull." He saw at the cinema a toreador stabbing a bull. The wounded animal had the same expression. The patient has, as he says, "calf's eyes." Everybody must take him for an im- becile. Only at home among his own people or if he is in his stronghold (his room) does he lose this forced expression. He observes himself in the mirror all day long. His first glance in the morning is toward the glass to know whether he is looking well or ill, what sort of a face he has. He puts on a face that is like the posteriors. He dreams : I am at home. Mobilization is taking place and I am called to the colors. My Berlin friend says resolutely : "I am not going !" Another man says: "My God, one has to enlist." I do not know what I ought to do. My mother is profoundly unhappy and in despair. Mobilization is marriage. He should marry. The Berlin friend is a rabid bachelor, which explains his decided refusal to marry. The second person is married. He is a Christian who has married a rich but unattractive Jewess.* The patient has plans: "If I do marry, 1 will sell myself to a rich woman. My mother will be un- happy in any case." He observes himself constantly. If anything is the matter, he has cloudy urine or his testicles are shriveled. Yet he feels him- self very happy in his illnesses and is pleased that he no longer fears his paraphilia. He flees from life's responsibilities to bed. Convalescence is always very pleasant to him. This is connected with the petting he experienced in childhood. When he was ill his mother took him into her bed. Nevertheless, he often hated her. He saw her in his fantasy having breakfast in a luxurious room while he remained in a shabby one. Ho always had the feeling that his mother kept the best from him. . . . ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHIST 239 He confesses a grotesque fantasy. He imagines a couple having coitus in which the woman Hes upon a child so that it is smothered. His leading motive is "evil mother." His mother was thus an evil mother in his fantasy. He made her this. He seems to be concealing a motive. Why did he make his "good mother" an **evil mother" ? He dreamed : I was walking in the graveyard in my nightshirt. A priest said I should not go there. Then I met a funeral procession. My father was being buried. Then the priest said: "Now you may go." I awoke and had a severe nosebleed. I was glad. For I have heightened blood pressure and my physician has repeatedly ad- vised blood letting. Then I went to sleep and dreamed again: I was in school and was accused of copying. I was angry that the injustice was done me. I wanted to call out to the school- mate who had made the accusation : "Coward !" I wanted to prove to him that I had not copied, but did not know how to do it. I awoke and thought : "The dreams to-night are gloomy." I went to sleep again and saw myself upon the balcony of the old house in Prague. Everything was veiled in dazzling white snow. I said : "I believe that it is good." It occurs to him with the first dream that he never goes to a cemetery. He is afraid that then some one in his family might die and he would have to go there frequently. The priest is from the village where he was born. He was a friendly man who often sent his mother books to read. His father was not to know any- thing about it. Further associations would not come. He admits, it is true, that he thinks every day of his father's death. Here we come upon the first suspicion of the mother, which ex- plains the association mother-prostitute. The priest was extraor- dinarily kind to him and adored his mother. The relation was doubtless purely a spiritual one. But the boy had a secret from his father. This allowed him to think and assume the worst. It explains also his fear of marriage and his preference for Chris- tian women. A Jewess had deceived his father and with a Chris- tian. He would take vengeance upon his father if he married a Christian. The reverence for woman is the overcompensation for despising her. If he makes his mother a prostitute, he can also make a lady of a prostitute. SADISM AND MASOCHISM Various things were brought forward which confirmed this com- plex. He admits in regard to the copying dream that he has always played a role in life in order to avoid humiliation. He plays the part of a hlase man of the world, in order to conceal his lack of ability. Thus he plays in life a thousand parts. He is always copying. He associates with snow that he would do a good business if it would snow. The dreams give evidence actually of a regression. His father will die while the son is still young, the latter will then perform the father's tasks and sleep in his bed (white Hnen). The dream brings the theme of unjust accusation. He has sus- pected his mother, who is as pure as snow. He has done her in- justice. He should bury the old matters (graveyard). The snow shall cover everything. Why does he brood over the mother's past? Why has he two versions of his mother, a black and a white? He should at last bury the old one and turn to life's tasks. But he borrows a scene of the past; he copies. The next day a fourth dream suddenly occurs to him, which he wanted to relate yesterday and had entirely forgotten: I had the desire to see my fetish woman; that is, a stout business woman in the inner city. I went to her place of business. Her sister was there instead of her. She is dark like a gypsy. She stooped to pick up something. It was only when I saw her buttocks that I knew it was not my fetish woman. But she was indignant and said : *T am afraid. This is a bad person !" Upon this she ran away. This dream depressed him very much. He does not want to believe that he returns to the sister as a substitute for the mother. He relates his various defeats. He had made the acquaintance of a handsome saleswoman. She pleased him very much, and he entered into relation with her. He invited her to go with him to the theater. He went to her shop to fetch her. Suddenly she had lost all charm for him. She looked old and worn. "She is prob- ably infected. She surely has a brother. The brother is a man of noble family. He would make you responsible. You are an un- lucky fellow ! You will become infected with her or impregnate her. She will make complaint and you will have a process on your hands. You had better not make a beginning." Thus the tendency to depreciation was at work within him, until in the end he fled and went to the theater alone. They were giv- ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHIST 241 ing the piece by Ohorn : Die Briider von St. Bernhard. A mother sacrifices her child to the Church. One priest advises another first to ask the mother. He had resolved hot to go home this week. Suddenly he said to himself : "You ought not to offend your aged mother !" and decided to go home. He came to his hotel and concluded not to go. He wanted to write his parents a letter. He had to tear up ten letters before he could finally send one ofif. This shows us that he has not written the real letter. Some writing in a closet, which said something about fifteen girls with fat buttocks, sent him from the building. He doubts whether he can be well. . . . The dream brings the two editions of his mother, the good (white) and the evil (dark — a gypsy) and shows plainly that his paraphilia goes back to the mother. He listens incredulously and doubts. He does not want to see the truth. . He has surrounded himself with a wall of inhibitions, which are to make marriage impossible for him. His condition of potency is that his partner shall seize his genital. What respectable woman would do that? He tests every woman and every girl upon the ground of this primary reaction. He disrobes all women and has with each one the thought: ''Could I be potent with her?" At once comes the humiliating response : "Impossible ! She would never make the necessary attack !" He went to the city where he had the exciting experience with the prostitute. He sought the locality where the brothel stood. ^ He looked for the prostitute in the city and would have been happy if he could have found her. But the brothel was closed and in place of the Maison Pohl stood an elegant Hotel Metropole. He dared not enter it. In the night he dreamed: There was a great feast. A physician (Dr. Stekel) showed me that he had a new walking stick, really a new handle. He was much delighted. I hastened away. Then I was with an artist ; I believe it was a sculptor or Dr. Stekel. There was also a little fellow there who said : "My mamma has a large backside. We could give it a good whipping He ran to fetch his mamma. I at once in the dream imagined the large buttocks and awoke with such an erection "as the world has never seen." Then I am again on the street and am to go to Dr. Stekel. I arrive about half an hour too late. There are a great many people SADISM AND MASOCHISM in the waiting room. Dr. Stekel comes out and calls to me : "See; that is my man !" We find between two transference dreams, in which he expects a "handling" by me, a dream in which a mother appears who is going to whip her boy. (The sculptor is also an allusion to this.) * The original attitude toward women and to his mother was sadistic. He wanted to strike them. He recalls that he once chose a small, weak prostitute and went with her to her room. He beat her a little and was able then to have coitus with good potency. The last dream excited him tremendously. He is good for noth- ing the next day after such dreams. He wandered about in the city, began finally to eat greedily, drank first wine, then a bottle of mineral water, and smoked a cigar in defiance of death. Then he felt so weak and exhausted that he went to his hotel and had to go to bed. He imitated the first anxiety attack in Aussig. Now it becomes plain why he chooses very strong prostitutes for himself. He wants to subjugate himself ; he fears his sadism. And behind this sadism toward the prostitute is concealed the hatred toward his false mother, who kept the best from him. He hates prostitutes after the masochistic acts and insults them mentally. . . . He directs these insulting words really against his mother. Yesterday before going to sleep he was in a remarkable state. As if an incubus were on him, as if he must fall into a swoon. He half lost consciousness and then saw me standing by his bed, bending over him and feeling his pulse. A truth is trying to force itself upon him, and he represses it. He flees into love toward me — into the transference. The homosexual component — so long overlooked — ^makes itself still more strongly felt. He was chasing after prostitutes yester- day, but not one of them pleased him. He wants to love a girl ; he no longer wants to repeat the old experiences. He reports that he is able to urinate before men if he several times repeats the word semmering. As association he relates the fact that he has resolved if he marries to take his wedding journey to the Semmering; which means, if 1 marry, I need not fear homo- sexuality. The associations ring and semen also lead to mar- riage. . . . * Hauen = to strike; i5t7d^aM^r = sculptor (Translator). ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHIST 243 Yesterday he sought a prostitute, as if in a frenzy, that he might perform normal coitus. At last he saw a suitable object. He followed the prostitute for an hour. A violent struggle was raging within him. Finally he said to himself: **No! this disso- lute life must have an end. You will embrace only one woman, whom you love!" Then he met a friend, and they went into the city park to seek for suitable objects. He trembled all over and "thanked God" that they finally returned unsuccessful. He again dreamed of mobilization (engagement). A physician put several questions to him, which he had to answer. He remembers the answers : percussion, auscultation. Then the doctor tapped him on the shoulder and said : You will be a good soldier !" An anagogic dream with a good prospective tendency : *'You will marry and be a good husband!" At the same time a flight from the truth. I ought to examine him only physically. He can keep the secret to himself. The last two weeks of the treatment mean a permanent struggle against the patient's former systems, which, however, are being steadily demolished. The interest in stout women with well- formed buttocks is gradually receding into the background. He decides to seek a friend. After all sorts of tragi-comic adven- tures, in which each little step appears to him like a victory, he meets a sympathetic girl. He has been with her in the cofifeehouse hardly half an hour when violent pains set in in his heart and arms. The analysis shows that he had previously had the thought : "What would your mother say, if she should see you sitting here with a girl?" Now there comes to light the noteworthy fact that his mother suffers from arteriosclerosis. Her cardiac pains radiate into the left arm. His suffering signifies therefore an identification with the mother and appears as a warning if he departs from the path of ordinary virtue. He has a secret notion that he will only begin to live when his parents are dead. For this reason he is always in fear that his parents might die. He wants indeed to live — and wishes for their death. On the other hand, a secret life plan exists to live with his sister after the parents' death. This idea is slowly conquered. He is able now to go home without having to think in the train that some one at home has died. SADISM AND MASOCHISM This notion has prevented him from forming an intimate connection with a girl. The old formula read : "You will begin to live, when the parents have died!" This formula has changed into a second one: ''When you begin to live, your parents will die!" This explains his fearful dread of coitus. A second assumption was hidden behind this formula, which bound the parents' death with the possession of the sister. The nature of the patient changes after suitable enlighten- ment. He takes fresh hope and decides to seek for a girl. He chooses the method of advertising. He receives as many as fifty communications. He selects the woman whose style and handwriting are most appealing to him. He sends her a ticket to the Burgtheater. So he cannot miss her. His excitement before the rendezvous cannot be described. He wants to run away; he passes through the most frightful states of anxiety; he is impatient and cannot wait for evening to come; and of course arrives too late at the theater. His dis- appointment in the object he meets is extreme. After such disillusionment he will not seek further. But he resolves tc make a second attempt, although such a thorough failure as he is ought not to begin such a tning. Behold ! This time he has good luck ; he meets a charming, sympathetic, modest, cultured, and sensible girl. He has no objection to her except that she is not "his type." She is blonde and thin and is lacking in pre- cisely that feature which forms the greatest attraction for him. She is his sexual antagonist. And yet! He feels himself drawn to her; he has violent erections in her presence; he is sure of his potency. He becomes freer. He no longer observes his face, whether it looks "dirty" ; he laughs and talks gaily and cheerfully. She is willing to give herself to him. But he post- pones the final act. He wants first to learn to know her, feel sympathy for her. Soon, however, he says to himself : "It is more than sympathy. I am in love with the girl." He must again — as every week — go home; he is tranquil upon the journey, has no fears of death, no heart pains. He even per- forms a heroic deed, for which formerly he would not have had the courage. He speaks to a woman in the coupe; she enters into conversation and before leaving (at a small sta- ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHISl 245 tion) gives him her address. He must visit her sometime; her husband has gone away for several months. His heart swells with pride! He, the man with the A — face, has won a ''re- spectable" woman. Now he is sure of himself. He is proud and self-confident, knows how to impress his girl. He has made himself free for this Sunday, and this shall be the wedding journey. Every- thing is ready; the rooms are engaged. He is to meet the girl at the railway station. Why only at the station, I ask ? There are several reasons for this. He is not excited and believes now in his cure. The erections when near the girl are painful, and he is consumed with desire to possess her. Now comes the puzzling story to him ; from the explanation and analytic clarifying of which he has withdrawn. The girl was not at the station. He waited in vain for some hours ; he sought the girl at home ; she conld not be found ; she had gone away over the Sunday. He finally meets her on Monday. She shows him a letter in which the rendezvous had been canceled. The postmark proves that she received the letter on Saturday while at work and that it had been posted that day. The patient stands before a mys- tery. Who knew the time of the rendezvous? Who knew how he subscribed himself? This was a thorough mystification! The girl reproached him ; he reproached her. She had made an excursion with a girl friend in place of her lover. He ques- tioned her on her honor and conscience whether she had told any one anything about it, which she vehemently denied upon her oath. She reproached him that it would have been best for him to have come and got her. He believed that she had had the letter written in order to free herself for the day and to have an excuse. This was not likely, for later she was always patiently at his disposal. I recognized at once that the patient had written the letter himself, evidently in a sort of trance, in order to escape being made well, which assumption he energetically disputed, calling himself an unlucky fellow of the first order. With this experience the analysis ended. He had no other theme than the girl and his bad luck. His desire vanished with 246 SADISM AND MASOCHISM the distrust. He lost the violent erections. He went with her after two weeks to the Semmering after he had fundamentally depreciated her, and had no erections in her presence. The result of this wedding journey, against which I had earnestly advised him, was a lamentable one. He spent the bridal night without being able to produce an erection. He disregarded my warnings and still clung to the girl, because she was no longer a danger to him. I had explained to him that he could not be well unless he would separate himself from his family. He promised to take every step to make himself independent. I had likewise recom- mended marriage with a girl whom he really loved. He should leave all experiments alone. Despite my warnings, he contin- ued to make the attempt with the depreciated object — naturally always with the same failure. For some time I did not see him ; then came a letter of misery that he was again in a condition of relapse and had taken up with a prostitute. This role pleased him best, because he might maintain his former attitudes. We see again in this case the connection between the prosti- tute complex and the mother. The mother is regarded as un- faithful and is hated. She is dishonored. Then as overcom- pensation there is subjection to a mistress. The relation mother-prostitute was particularly clear in this case and it ex- plains the severe anxiety attack after the scene in Aussig in the Maison Pohl. The original sadism is very well concealed. It could not be completely enough rediscovered in the analysis, which was all too brief, to lead to a successful result. (He had to go home every week for three days. Length of the entire treatment six weeks, that is, twenty-four hours, which really represents the beginning of an analysis.) The discovery of the death clause is of especial importance, the parapathic amalgamation of death and normal intercourse. We will find in all cases of this kind the same fusion of the sexual problem with the death problem. The fear that the parents might die if he has normal coitus may be explained as derived from his fantasy: *Tf I have to do with my mother sexually, I might kill her.'' Lust murder stands behind the death clause of the masochist. . . . He flees from his aggres- ANALYSIS OF A MASOCHIST 247 siveness into passivity. The more extreme the activity of his fantasies, the further swings the pendulum of passivity in real- ity. In the severe obsessive parapathies, which we shall discuss in the succeeding volumes, the conflict between the death and life problem reaches even to caricature, which often enough changes to tragedy. XVII CANNIBALISM, NECROPHILISM, AND VAMPIRISM Help me, comrade, see them coming 1 Hark the hideous, horrid humming I See the bodies flaming, glowing. Werewolves, dragons — hell prevailing, All its cursed stream is flowing, Male and female. Naught prevailing Let us flee this evil swarming. Noise and din our ears assailing; In the deeps a stench is forming; Hell's noxious brew. Invades our nostrils here anew ! Goethe {Walpurgis Night). Any one who reads attentively the preceding volumes of this work and the clinical histories which have been given will be astonished how frequently we come upon traces of the crassest sadistic acts; that is, cannibalism, necrophilism, and vampirism. We have to assume a phase in the development of mankind in which these impulses were permitted to appear openly. If they show themselves now in the light of civiliza- tion, we are to consider them as atavistic petrifactions. We find them often enough in the parapathic reversion. It is very interesting to confirm how undisguised these impulses appear in the fantasies of paralogies. We shall be able to observe them quite as often in the fantasies which accompany an epi- leptic attack or in the twilight states after the attack. But the parapathic without epileptic seizures has frequently, also, to fight against these impulses and expresses them then through fear and disgust. Very many people become vegetarians who can eat no meat because it reminds them of ^'corpses." Others are unable to visit a cemetery without being overtaken with nausea. We might mention in contrast those persons who are sexually excited in graveyards. I have spoken in The Lan- guage of the Dream of the patient who became extraordinarily excited sexually after a funeral and very potent. Another liked 248 CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 249 best to perform onanism in a graveyard. Love for statues belongs here, also the masquerade in a brothel where the pros- titute has to play the part of a dead person. There are cases in which a coffin must heighten the reality of the scene. We must include here those men who reach the highest pleasure when the woman lies motionless like a corpse, or men who can have intercourse only with a sleeping woman (the image of death), who fall in love with girls who are dangerously ill, marry them and lose their potency when the women recover. Other psychic diseases which approximate paralogy betray an atavistic fright- fulness. Abraham has called attention to the fact that melan- choliacs frequently achieve a regression to their cannibalistic instincts, and that their disturbances in eating are to be at- tributed to repressed cannibalism. Our fairy tales reveal to us many cannibalistic and necro- philiac scenes as a residue of primitive occurrences. The saga of the vampire has never disappeared from the folk conscious- ness.^ Remnants of bloody sacrifice are found in the various religions, so that it need not astonish us if sadism draws into the circle of its fantasies and deeds these paraphilias, too, so difficult of comprehension to the civilized man. It is strange how frequently necrophiliac acts may be found occurring under the influence of a superstition. Hellwig re- ports that a mother in order to cure her hermaphroditic son opened the grave of a virgin. The son had to follow the coun- sel of the mother and lie naked upon the corpse ''in order to bring his sex in order.'' He was discovered the next day dead in this position. Herbert Silberer tells in his excellent little book, Der Aherg- lauhe ^ [Superstition] : "Graves were opened and corpses vio- lated so that persons could procure for themselves thieving fingers and lights and other such things. The finger of a child, (usually of one that has died unbaptized) should, for example, open all locks and make the thief invisible; and candles molded from human fat should prevent those who were sleeping from waking. Magyar criminals believe they can render themselves invisible by taking the little finger of a stillborn child or by sticking an ordinary candle into the heart of such a child. 250 SADISM AND MASOCHISM Hungarian gypsies use for their thieves' lanterns the thumb of a dead body disinterred at the new moon, and which has lain in the grave nine weeks. The process of thought now becomes clear to the experienced reader : the light from the body of the dead is a dead, therefore invisible, light, to which is added the further virtue of the equally invisible new moon ; the nine weeks are analogous to the period of pregnancy; in truth, a reversal of the same, a period of maturity. In Bukovina thieves remove the marrow from a human shin bone and mold in the latter a candle instead. If they march around a house three times with this, the inhabitants sink into a deathlike slumber. "The murders committed, likewise in order to appropriate portions of the body — heart, kidneys, fat — are still more hor- rible than the desecration of corpses undertaken for the afore- said purposes. Many deeds which appear at first sight as rape murder are doubtless, as A. Hellwig considers probable, to be attributed to such motives. Murders for the preparation of thieves' lanterns have been reported especially from Russia. In 1869, a boy was found in the region Vladimir-Volgasth with a round hole cut in his skin, which was drawn away from his abdomen. The murderer confessed having done the deed in order to get human fat for a thieves' light. A murder in the Lukajanov region, 1904, was supposed to be the work of a thief. A boy was stabbed to death by a number of peasants, among whom was his uncle, and his hand chopped off, which then was taken along as a talisman upon the raids made by the band. "The belief in the magic power of 'innocent,' and especially of unborn, children, particularly in earlier times, occasioned frightful deeds. There is a report in Grosser Schaiiplats jam- merlicher M ordgeschichten [Great Scene of Wretched Tales of Murder'] of a peasant forced by two robbers to deliver to them his pregnant wife, whom they bound tc a tree; then they began to cut open her body, but were caught at it and in Upsala were tortured with red-hot pincers and broken upon wheels. They confessed at the trial that they had already de- voured the hearts of two unborn children, and that after en- joying the third they would have been able to make themselves invisible, succeed to great riches, and perform all sorts of miracles. CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 251 "The ancient belief in the magic power of blood and of human sacrifice is still present in rudimentary form in unen- lightened levels of society : hence the all-too-inflammable readi- ness of the passionate masses of the people to accuse another hated group of ritual murder. The Jews especially of Eastern Europe until within the recent past have had to suffer bloody persecutions because of alleged ritual murder." I have previously mentioned that the parapathic manifests these impulses only in parapathic repression or in symbolic actions. It is quite otherwise with the paralogic. The familiar cases in literature up to the present time of necrophiliac, canni- balistic, or vampiristic crime almost always have to do with mentally diseased individuals or epileptics, whose illness was unrecognized. Matters would be quite different if one knew the fantasies of all sadists. The fantasies of many sadists are horrible. But usually an unbridgeable chasm yawns between fantasy and reality. These fantasies are for the most part not clearly in the con- sciousness of the parapathic sadist. They lie in the middle range in the polyphony of his thought and do not appear quite plainly even in his dreams. We shall see later how such im- pulses force themselves through finally in the epileptic seizure. It is not the epileptic attack only which makes possible the expression of the antisocial fantasies. The simple absence, the attack of migraine, depression, disclose themselves to the analyst as reactions of forbidden fantasy. "Depression is the sorrow for the vice which cannot be virtue." The analyses of melancholiacs afford us evident confirmation of this thesis. I will bring first the fantasies of a melancholiac woman, who had submitted herself to analysis in "full reason" on account of a long-persisting depression. My tried and trusted assistant, Frau Hilda Milko, had to labor for months before the fan- tasies became conscious, those which, completely hidden in the middle and lower registers, could manifest their devastating effect. I will pass over the detailed history of the illness and mention simply that the case was that of a woman of thirty- four years of age, unhappy in marriage. She sees her youth and beauty disappearing without fulfillment of her once wide- SADISM AND MASOCHISM reaching demands upon life. I will give here merely her day* dreams, which she was able to secure : Fantasies of a Melancholiac Patient (First layer). I see my child falling from a window. I see my child run over by the electrics and the blood gushing high. My mother shall break her neck ! My brother-in-law shall break his neck, and his little boys, who have annoyed me very much, shall perish in the snow like dogs. I am afraid my husband will become insane. I am in a brothel and am having intercourse with many men and shall be sexually infected. I shall be ravished by soldiers. A young king lets me undress completely and when he has possessed me, he derides me. I had intercourse with a peasant youth and when he had had possession of me, he struck me because I was afraid. I have had coitus with a dog ; the housemaid laughed at me. I reproach myself because I have killed a watchman who wanted to lock me up. I have cut off the member of a former admirer and I fall in a swoon when I see the blood. My child shall die, for it is impudent and vulgar. All my brothers and sisters are killed and burned, and it is a matter of indifference to me. I particularly wish death to my brother, for he has never concerned himself for the rest of us. I am facing an operation because I have an abscess in my ab- domen. The friend of my brother-in-law threatens me with the kitchen knife because I will not submit myself to him ; then he marries some one else. I have often feared to be alone with the child; I am afraid I will eat it up. I have had a relation with my former admirer and have borne a child, which I have killed. A man has come therefore and wanted to denounce me. I have killed him with the knife, buried him secretly in the field, and destroyed all traces by which the crime might be discovered. When the bell rings, I am afraid that the police have come to get me. CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 253 All people are alike to me; I am willing evil shall happen to any of them. I begrudge my sister-in-law her husband ; for this reason I have wished his death. I should like to be God and play with people's fate. I hate my husband fiercely because he does not understand my illness, and I should like to destroy him. I should like to break ofif a man's member and stick it in my vagina and let it grow there further. My mother told me of Holy Rabbi L., who was so strong that he rent houses and men in pieces ; I should like to do the same. She told me further of a legend that Jesus in the temple flew to the roof. Now there was a rabbi there who thought to himself I will be still more clever, and he flew still higher ; then he urinated upon Jesus, who fell down. I, too, should Hke to do as the rabbi did. I should like to be as tall as the Stephan tower so that I could see in all the houses. I should like to build a tower of Babel and see what God and the angels are doing, also whether they are sexual beings. I am envious of everybody and have evil thoughts about them all. I am always seeing them in my mind as becoming mad or sick. But I suffer so much that I have already suffered for all man- kind. Second layer. When I have read of cannibals, I have put to myself the ques- tion whether I could eat human flesh. I have always felt then a severe nausea. Now I often imagine that I am eating human flesh and feel the same disgust. I should like best to be a veg- etarian. I always have to think of the animal corpses. I have the feeling many times that I could bite my child. I often bit when I was a child, if I was naughty. I often think of the graveyards and how the dead bodies are rotting in the ground. I should much rather be cremated. I should like to cut off a dead man's member and have it sewed fast to me. I should Hke to be a man. I should like to rob a dead man's soul before it went to heaven and turn myself into a man. I would then seduce all women. I want to taste every man and every girl, what their flavor is, (It is sexually meant, but equivocally expressed.) 254 SADISM AND MASOCHISM Third layer. I am a vampire. I come nights and suck out people's brains. I often believe that a vampire has sucked out my blood and my joy in life. I should like to wallow in corpses. I want to be stronger and stronger. I know that the dead bodies cannot defend themselves. I should like to torture people, even after they are dead. . . . One would find similar thought processes in all melancholiacs, if one took the trouble. They are often more concealed; often they do not come into consciousness. But hate is always lurk- ing here in the depths of the psyche. The strange thing is only that the dreams may show the opposite and be cheerful and harmless in tone (Schilder). A *'key dream" will frequently betray after long analysis the cannibalistic foundation of melancholia, as the next case shows, a case analyzed by my pupil, Dr. M. Hareven.^ FRAGMENTS FROM THE ANALYSIS OF A MELANCHOLIAC By Dr. M. Hareven My attention was called by Dr. Stekel, under whose direction I carried out the analysis of a melancholiac patient to be described here, to a number of the features peculiar to melancholia and I was instigated by him to set these forth. They manifest them- selves in dream pictures of the night and in many other interesting symptoms. The striking characteristics are connected with the distinguish- ing features which lie at the basis of melancholia. They are these : the sadistic-cannibalistic direction of the impulses, the deeply hidden hostile attitude toward the environment, the prominence of oral instinct satisfaction (Freud), and the capacity for incor- poration or embodiment of the sexual object even to complete, absolute identification with the same. We will bring forward in the borders of this work simply the material that is of interest from the above standpoint, but will interpolate into the fragmentary presentation brief supplementary matter and remarks, so that we may retain as far as possible the unity of the analysis. To attain the purpose mentioned, we will not attempt a chrono- logical discussion, but present the material at hand, chiefly the CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 255 dreams, in groups arranged according to the leading motive found in the dream. Case Number 41. Patient S. J. is a girl of twenty-three years of age, student, foreigner, coming from a provincial city, Slav, the second among six brothers and sisters, brought up in traditional moral strictness and therefore without any sexual enlightenment. Nothing to be mentioned regarding somatic or other hereditary ill. The patient states that a year previously, just after the death of her mother, of whom she had had the care, she was seized by an irresistible sadness, which is accompanied by complete loss of the joy in life, of ability to work. The patient dwells in a pro- found depression, which gives to her entire bearing a striking monotonousness. She spends her day in complaining bitterly of her lost health. The patient shows a strong inclination to rationalization. Every new symptom that appears (or that is related again) is immedi- ately explained by her as "of course" and ''natural." **A11 my ills began with the loss of my dearly loved mother. She was the only being to whom I clung with all my feeling. Since her death I have lost all pleasure in life. It is so of course! She was very ill the last months and I was her nurse : the over- exertion, the grief, the anxiety for my mother's life — they ex- hausted my powers and now I lack every bit of energy for living. So it is quite 'natural' is it not? Even if one still possesses so much energy, it may be exhausted and so one is unfitted for life." This effort to explain has mingled with it also a transparent tendency to contradiction, to which something of a querulous na- ture is joined. It often seems as if the patient opposes to my in- terpretation a categoric, rather blunt *'No," only to work out the same for herself in her own way as something "natural" "self-evi- dent." The patient discovers this herself in later sessions, when she remarks: "I know well that all that you say may be connected with my unconscious processes. The conscious conviction of the opposite is not decisive enough ; my 'No' has thus no foundation. And yet I have to say 'No' ; I can do nothing about it." This compulsion to explanation and contradiction makes the impression of an ever-returning, burdensome attempt to end the conflict by the way of parapathy and betrays at the same time a "wanting to hold the physician at a distance" ; it is a tendency to depreciation at work from the very beginning and functioning as 256 SADISM AND MASOCHISM resistance. As if she had wanted to say to me : "Although we will occupy ourselves diligently with my complexes, I hardly believe that you will be able to reveal to me anything new, 'unknown to me.' " In the further course of the analysis this original attitude along with the transference elaborates itself to a position stubbornly maintained by the patient. She splits the analysis into a conscious (official) one, in which she denies everything without exception (here it means: Nothing will come of it) ; and into an unofficial, more correctly unavowed, one, in which the patient tacitly gains understanding of various things and accepts much. The further analytic material bears witness to this unadmitted progress of the analytic therapeutic effect. Thus the dreams become more nu- merous, press into ever deeper layers, direct themselves to the main theme (original conflict), present new problems, attempt new solutions. The monotonous picture of the melancholia is enlivened with a number of somatizations, the denied transference manifests itself now and then through an unforeseen move. We will come back to this. The first sessions pass in endless repetition of the monotonous complaints. Some of them receive special emphasis from the patient : *T have no joy in life. The world has no attraction for me, but seems to be worthless. Do not misunderstand me. I do not at all wish to say that the world is bad. On the contrary, the world is good ; I am the bad one. I am dissatisfied with myself, therefore I cannot enjoy the world. Everything is beautiful, uplifting, satis- fying, but not for me. I who know of the loveliness of the world yet remain cold to it. *T seem to myself unworthy of life." "Whom do you blame *T blame myself for not having been strong enough to be able to bear the illness and death of my mother. Others, too, undergo many a misfortune, yet they endure it steadfastly. Why have I been so weak; why could I not maintain my health? I am at fault! Every person should be able to keep his health; I have lost mine ; that is my wrong. "How could I have changed so in the course merely of one year ? It is unbelievable ! I was never before as I am now. Before this I was different, totally different! I no longer know myself. I seem a stranger to myself. It was not so at all formerly; it was CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 257 so delightful in me and about me. Why have I lost my former nature? Only I myself am at fault!" The patient is tormented with the distressing feeling of the "strange" the opposite of the dejd vu. She comes in her com- parison of "formerly" and "now" upon a third something; in her effort to see herself clearly within she finds a foreign body, has an intimation of the splitting, despite the too- far-reaching identifica- tion with her chosen object. We will now pass to the groups of dreams. In the course of the work under Dr. Stekel's guidance we have learned to know and to recognize that there is a kind of dream which we might call "prognostic." These dreams permit only lim- ited insight into the individual threads of the parapathic network, afford no key interpretations regarding the development and es- tablishment of the parapathy, and are unfavorable for obtaining associations. Yet they represent upon the functional path a plastic picture of the instinctive tension and of the play of forces. They pass judgment upon what is endopsychically perceived. Such dreams aid us in finding the leading orientation, for they disclose the abnormal, specific coloring of the impulsive direction of the paraphilia. Our patient put a number of such "dreams" at our disposal, indicating the abnormal sadistic instinctive trend at the founda- tion of her parapathy. Dream I: I find myself in a room with a gentleman. He is leading by two chains, one in each hand, a dog and a cat. The animals are very beautiful, yellow in color. Then the man steps with one foot on the dog and one on the cat, delivers them cruel blows, rages, becomes furious. He evidently wanted to kill the animals. I could not look at the horrible scene, wanted to go out, but the man closed the door and took out the key. At last he took the dog in his arms, cut off his ears, and gave the ears to the cat to eat, which it did. I pounded on the door, screaming: "Opei» the door ; let me out of this room ; I am suffocating ; air, air !" Supplement: A young cat which had till then remained in a dark corner of the room really ate the ears. Interpretation : The patient would not bring any associations. We will con- tent ourselves with the following remarks : The blows, the fury of 258 SADISM AND MASOCHISM the man, his cruelty, the animals, should represent, as strife in a dream usually does, an inner fury, the entire internal struggle. The man is then to be understood as the impulse, dog and cat, two impulsive tendencies mutually devouring or excluding each other, the more precise configuration of which cannot be derived because of the absence of associations. The whole action and behavior of the man, the choice of symbols (actually three animals) point to the strongly sadistically colored instinctive life, which may be also the direction of impulse represented through the dog and cat and the final result of the struggle. The defense of the patient as observer (the man stands for her as active participant), the closed room, the chains, the suflfocation, suggest the patient's reactionar}/ attitude arising from the censoring (conscious) personality and determining the extraordinary repression. She is compelled to descend to the subterranean, secret torture chamber of her own psyche and to be a spectator by night of the sorry drama of her soul. She carries within herself the rock of Prometheus without being able to escape from herself except by circumventing con- sciousness and falling into a monotonous melancholy, deeply ladei/ with a consciousness of guilt. This would be the functional in- terpretation. We must, in a more deeply determined layer and supported by other dreams, and associations to be mentioned later, conclude from the severed ears, from the key which the man car- ries himself (yellow color, jealousy toward the mother? See further), a castration motive. But we recognize especially in the devouring of the ears the abnormal sadistic-cannibalistic impulse, the tendency to incorporation, and the oral stamp of the melan- choliac, to which we will bring many more contributing facts."* Dream II : I dreamed that I found myself in my nightgown and barefooted upon a railway track. Unexpectedly the train came, which must overtake me. I began to run forward to save myself. I could not turn into a side track, for right and left flowed deep water, out of which many crocodile heads with wide-opened jaws stretched threateningly. I thought in my anxiety : "1 cannot run as fast as the train, so my only way is to lie down on the ground so that the train may pass over me without injuring me." Associations : "I remember a passage in Dostoevski's The Brothers Karamasov where a youth to prove his courage lay down upon the tracks in the same manner as I did in the dream. He wanted to defy fate. CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 259' He confessed afterward, however, that at the moment when the train rushed upon him hissing and roaring he was seized with in- describable fear and regret. Any one who has once gone through such an experience will be wiser in many respects for the rest of his Hfe." The patient will not leave the Karamasov theme, and the follow- ing associations pass over into an exalted enthusiasm for the youngest of the brothers Karamasov (Alioscha). (The type of successful repression. She would be glad to be like him, but actually resembles the father Karamasov.) We will here, as in the preceding dream, true to our purpose, enter into no detailed inter- pretation of the dream but only stress the general orienting fea- tures. The analogy with the earlier dream is striking. This dream is a different kind of representation of the same theme. The hiss- ing train is like the raging man, the crocodile heads like the dog and cat. Here, too, the dreamer in despair seeks in vain for a way out. She finds it in "lying down on the ground" ; that means, she escapes the solving of her problem through repression and flees into a silent, impenetrable crust of sadness, under which un- bridled, asocial thoughts are teeming. The patient, familiar with Slavic language, knows the expression: "Lower than the grass, deeper than the water." Gypsies and a chiromancer have told her : "Under your gentle, passive exterior a volcanic nature is concealed." The Karamasov association material shows how in the dream (beyond the conscious censorship) the patient is clear as to the most important meaning of the dream. The nightgown, the bare feet, would be indications as to the fundamental basis upon which the problem is engaged. Water has a particular sig- nificance in this patient's dreams and always appears with her in close connection with further erotic symbolization. We will merely refer to the relation of the dream to the treatment: the patient adapts herself in part to the analytic self-knowledge ; she lies down upon the ground after a course of reasoning ("the only means," and so on). In reality, during this period the monotonous melan- choliac mood with its incessant self -accusations is being per- meated with a number of somatization symptoms. This is perhaps to be considered a favorable "somatic progression" after the regres- sion which has previously taken place: the patient complains that her eyes are too deeply sunk in her head. (This somatization phenomenon discloses itself later as one conditioned by the pros- titute complex. The patient questions herself repeatedly whether she really has the eyes of a prostitute, blue-flecked, circled, half- 26o SADISM AND MASOCHISM opened, seductive, and the like.) She awakens in the night and remains one or two minutes long ''paralytic" (wished for paral- ysis in order to have experience according to the principle **pleas- ure without guilt." The patient dreams appropriately that she falls asleep on the street, awakes [in the dream] and misses her money) ; that is, she cannot make a single movement until she turns upon her right side. For some time she has been waking in the night with attacks of suffocation, which are relieved by the open- ing of the window. Dream III. I enter a large house ; it is a gymnasium. I notice in the second story, as I go through the corridor, a lion in the door which leads into a classroom. I approach it. Many people of both sexes are in the classroom, who have climbed upon the benches and other pieces of furniture in their excessive fear of the lion. It seems as if I have "known" this lion, and it has also "recognized" me again. I kneeled down quite close to it and clasped its neck in my arms. This was the only way in which I could lead it from the room. It licked my face. At this moment the thought darted through me: "If it does not recognize me, it will crush my head with its teeth." But it knew me. I then locked it in another room so that the people need no longer fear. In order to avoid repetition we will go no further into the general meaning of the dream. The only noteworthy thing is the representation of the inhibiting repression (she locks the lion in so that the people need no longer be afraid), the forced parapathy, but at the same time the feeling of superiority and of pride on the part of the parapathic in her secret source of satisfaction, in her hidden shadowy world in contrast to that of the banal PhiHs- tine. The Adlerian "under-over" theory finds no confirmation in this dream: the patient is under, but the sense of superiority is however very clear. It is also not to be left out of consideration that the patient had suffered in her school years an aggression from her music teacher. As a musician he had a fine head of hair. Thus the lion scene may be related to him. She quotes : "In his anger, like a lion; When he smiles, he's like a boy; Thus the man." (Calderon) 7 CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 261 An evident father-mother fixation comes to light from other dreams. The Hon which she knows can therefore be related to her own impulse or to a condensed imago figure (the licking). One more final dream of this sort: Dream IV: I was boarding a train, which was so full that I had to stand on the step. It was an excursion. Then I found myself upon the locomotive. The train had to pass an exceedingly narrow place. I asked myself : "Will the train be able to go through without danger?" I was anxious. Yet we passed over very for- tunately. From my position I could observe the wonderfully beautiful way. We came safely to the station. Again the same dream : danger and the overcoming of it. The locomotive is according to Stekel a symbol of the dangerous in- stinct, which she here will absolutely conquer. The patient brought also religious dreams of gloomy content, which did not give the impression of individual accessions of morality but represented a protest and warning of the total guiding personality against the abnormal impulsive configuration. Dream V : I came an hour too early into the consultation room. — You were angry. I excused myself. — In order to pass the time, I went with the electrics to see the surrounding country. As I climbed down the hill, I had to pass a bridge which led between two mills. The bridge had terraces ( ?). Then a little girl came toward me. She warned me to go on or something would meet me which would terrify me. I turned back. Other boys and girls also turned back, all very much frightened. I climbed down a hill and noticed that the sky was lowering, the wind was rising, a severe storm was coming. I tried to return to you as rapidly as possible in order to have a roof over my head and be able to shelter myself from the storm. But not to come still too early, I asked a man how late it was. He did not understand German. I repeated the question in French. The man answered he was happy to find some one who understood his ''father tongue" (the usual expression is however langue maternelle). Going by a church we met two girls in mourning, weeping for their mother who had died. There appear clearly in this dream : Resistance (she comes not at the right time and uses the analyst merely as a protection against dangers) ; representation of the female genitaJ and coitus 262 SADISM AND MASOCHISM (small bridge between two mills) ; the girl appears upon the bridge ; the terraces, the church, the storm, the hill, purely sexual sym- bols. She tempts the analyst, shows him how one may make better use of the hour. Then the incestuous wish (father tongue, dead mother, whether it is still not late). Neverthless, the religious voice, the urgent warning against passion, seems to us the funda- mental feature. The patient feels herself ensnared in the sexual labyrinth and sees the bad weather coming upon her. She seeks with the analyst shelter from the weather ; that is, the transference love shall preserve her from her prostitute tendency. Dream VI: It seems as if I have killed some one. In flight I spring upon the roof of a train. As the train speeds faster on its way, I leap upon a very small bridge without a railing. I wonder that I can walk upon such a narrow path. Then I hear a watchman's whistle. Next I am with a girl dressed in black. We enter a gloomy way, which leads into the mountains. There are no trees round about, no grass ; the sun does not shine ; nothing but rocks, dreary and waste. We come to a shed. There a number of galley slaves are working. Among these people the poor child stills its thirst. Interpretation : The small dark girl is to be understood here also as the sexually symbolic characteristic feature of the dream. The bridge, as in the former dream (bridge and mills), is the "to be or not to be" of her own instinctive constitution. ("How can I walk upon so narrow a way? — expression of the danger arising from within.) — The patient herself enlightens us in regard to the latter part of the dream. She comes by a very roundabout way to the theme "Raskolnikov.'* She is struggling with murder im- pulses. We will turn now to the most interesting group of dreams. We begin the series with a striking key dream: Dream VII. I was married to a man whom I neither liked nor could respect. But he was very rich. I climbed into my automobile; it bore me away very rapidly. I thought : "Many have loved me ; I have also liked many people; but I shall now not be able to enjoy anything of mutual love.'* I had the feeling of a "half happiness." I noticed that the way led downward. Then it was no longer an automobile, but a splendid fiacre. I was driving the horses myself. The way led ever deeper and CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 263 deeper. Then I came to a park with very dark avenues. I wanted to turn into an avenue which curved to the left, but the horse was refractory and pulled toward the right. Then I drew the reins with all my might toward the left, but the fiacre took a zigzag course. It was no longer a horse, but a little dog which I was driving with the reins like a horse. The road went down still deeper and deeper. Then we came into a tunnel, in which clear water was flowing, so that one could plainly see the stones at the bottom. With the reins in my hands, leaping from stone to stone, I came to the opposite shore of the stream and in this way reached an amphi- theater made only of stones. There we met a woman. (I had the feeling that this woman was myself.) I stood still in order to observe her. The woman seated herself on the ground. Near her lay a man who had been killed. I did not know whether the woman was the murderess. She ate something and said to me: "I shall eat the heart of this man!" I stooped in order to see better. I saw how the woman laid the head of the dead man upon her lap ; then she tore out the heart and devoured it to the last bit. I saw the opening through which the woman had torn out the heart. Now the man made some movements. The woman let him go, for she plainly feared his vengeance; she wanted to go home. I explained to her how to find the way : "You go forward, then left, then again forward, then right, and now forward, so you will reach home." When she had disappeared I felt pity for the man and carried him with the aid of a peasant woman out of the tunnel into the open. Here we found some houses with terraces, people work- ing; the sun shone brightly. — I said: ''Here one has much sun, and it is a pleasure to work." It seems likely that this extraordinarily condensed dream (key and developmental dream at the same time) must be transposed to appear intelligible and thus : While the first part up to the little dog belongs to the later course and elaboration of the already-exist- ing parapathic nucleus, the tunnel portion relates to the primary trauma or primary problem of the parapathy and represents also the essential nature of the melancholia : sadism, cannibalism, and incorporation. The fantasy of the mother's womb is plain enough in the face of the familiar symbols (tunnel, river in the tunnel, the going out into the sunlight, the looking on at a scene concealed before God and man, the self -observation with doubling of the personality, the winding way which the woman has to traverse in order to reach "home"). Possibly we have here a condensation of 264 SADISM AND MASOCHISM two unconscious pathological thought formations, the uterine fantasy with the Noah complex. This association seems so much the more plausible because the two thought structures mentioned still possess a common motive; namely, the flight from painful reality, the longing for an ideal situation, where the values of reality and external law are enjoying a truce. The functional and symbolic significance of the mother 's-womb fantasy empha- sized by Stekel should be understood not only as an ontogenetic gravitation in the nature of memory toward the one-time-experi- enced state of almost complete absence of reaction, but much more as an active psychic achievement, the striving to think oneself artificially into a situation which annuls reality but affirms the complex world. The parapathic seeks in the fantasies of the mother's body not absolute Nirvana but the adequate, symbolically given place into which he can transport his inner world and where he can nurture it in pure culture. Amniotic fluid and the waters of the Flood are symbols of isolated solitude and introversion. We have stressed the importance of the mother. We have learned from other dreams and manifestations of the patient that her brother must also play a decisive part in the parapathy. The patient only reluctantly recalls that her older brother was very fond of her when she was nearly sixteen years old. He would very often kiss her and embrace her passionately. She felt that they were not brotherly kisses, but absolutely sensuous ones. The mother noticed and found fault. She would therefore avoid him. He asked her as often as he could to go walking with him. He always selected for these walks quite retired spots or lonely paths through the wood. She frequently asked him why he chose such walks as these. He was also very jealous, so that he drove all young men and suitors from the house. He sent away by lies one young man who was courting her, of which she knew nothing until several years later. The patient does not admit that she felt anything for this brother. On the contrary, this is precisely the brother in whom she is not interested in any way, while the younger one is her favorite (displacement?). I refer to certain dreams: i. She is plucking unripe fruit with her brother; 2. She scuffles with her brother, whereby he becomes small. 3. She dreams she is suffo- cating in a room ; he must open the door. 4. The brother becomes small and jumps into the river, with which she says it was very dangerous ; she had with this the feeling that she had been there before. 5. The patient's parlor maid has left ; she is in despair. CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 265 but the brother's servant comes ; the servant puts everything in order. All these dreams point to the fact that the dead man of the key dream also represents her brother. "Why did you agree to go with your brother on these lonely walks if it was painful to you?" "It is only 'natural' to walk with one's brother ; I was always a lonely and reserved nature. I used to shut myself in my room for hours and sing; melancholy songs I liked very much. My father did not like it if I sang or played an instrument. But I played on every instrument possible. One of my brothers called me for this reason a gypsy." (The patient often sees herself in her dreams as a gypsy.) "Do you understand why at the beginning of the treatment (the patient had been at that time already somewhat enlightened) among the thousand memories of your life it was always just this one which arose : It was upon an excursion in the mountains dur- ing the vacation when a student killed by mistake a girl student, believing that he was shooting a swan, and then the very great despair of the brother of the girl who was killed ; he even wanted to commit suicide ?" "That explains itself ; it made a strong impression upon me ; for that reason I remembered it." "Do you see then no connection between the brother and the fact that in your dreams and recollections a remote mountain region or wooded country appears again and again, at which you are fearful ? Once you saw there a snake with its head squeezed oflf ; a second time you were gathering flowers with long stems ; you cried out : 'They are all for me !' A third time you came upon a petroleum well, from which you feared that you and the woods around you might go up in flames." "I know what you want to say, but I have told you repeatedly that everything that you conjecture of my feeling for my brother seems to me impossible, even absurd ; I cannot believe it ; I do not feel it." "If you do not deny the connection and have even learned to see it, how else would you explain it ?" "I do not know ; I cannot explain it ; it seems to me simple and natural. I cannot believe concerning it what you tell me here !" After several days, during which the patient was seized with a veritable "dream diarrhea," we return to the key dream. "I have already explained to you repeatedly; I cannot go more carefully into it now, but I should like to know your opinion in 266 SADISM AND MASOCHISM regard to another process of thought. Pay attention! Your complaints are chiefly: 'Why have I not been able to keep my health ? — I am the one at fault !' *Why have I lost my former na- ture?' *I have really never lived — and I am already losing my bloom!' 'How beautiful I was once!* "It may be that these sayings are displaced and inverted com- plaints of which you have already learned to know many ex- amples. They will then relate to a person decisive for your child- hood, your brother, and would simply say : 'Why was he not bold enough and ready to take the decisive step which I as a woman could pot take ; why should I fade without having experienced love? He is the one at fault; as long as he was unmarried, it would not have been impossible.* All the bad symptoms of your illness have occurred in the last three years; that is, since the brother's marriage.*' "If you only knew what a painful impression this theme always makes upon me.** Thus the patient defends herself stubbornly against discussion of the key dream and the brother theme. But the analysis always goes back again to the brother. It is he whose heart she devours in the key dream. If we want to form an idea of this key dream it reads: The patient dreams herself into a situation woven of the uterine fantasy and Noah complex as the adequate ground upon which she can realize her otherwise unthinkable wishes. She loves in the nar- row physiological and literal sense. What she would like to have, she will actually "have** in the true significance of the word ; she devours, she incorporates her object and bears it from now on within herself, so that this assimilated object can no longer be an "object." As emotional activities concerning this point, the other relations between the projected and projecting ego do not count. This is perhaps the reason it is so difficult for her to follow the indications of the dream symbolism, more or less to accept the interpretations ; for this reason she meets all my explanations with the beau rire des ignorants [beautiful smile of the ignorant]. It would be for her like asking her to look at her own forehead without a mirror. The purely symbolic form of expression is not to be overlooked : she is as greatly fixed upon her brother and he belongs to her as completely as if she had once taken his heart to herself forever. A further determination : He shall rather be dead than belong to another woman. The sadistic coloring of the action needs no discussion. CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 267 The other parts of the dream signify the development of the parapathy and interest us here but little. The auto (onanism) impulse; she is only half satisfied, "half happiness"; at the end onanism is no longer sufficient — the automobile changes into a fiacre; she wanders, she goes in a zigzag course, she goes down; for the proper living out of her life nothing remains but a little dog. The awakening dead person is also the beginning of dis- covery and the recognition of the fixation (Stekel: rising from the dead and dying again in the dream, The Language of the Dream). ^ She is afraid of the man's revenge; she is afraid to recognize her sadistic-cannibalistic sexuality. The tunnel section is easy to understand as a prologue, a preliminary story. I might, before we pass on to another dream, allude once more to the fact that the incorporated object (the brother) is drawn into a situation similar to the fantasy of the mother's body; uterine fantasy, Noah complex, and the projected territory of her own unconscious enter here into a comparison. The patient descends into a secret treas- ure chamber in order to live out her life. (Another dream of an- other patient reads : I am lying with my brother in a chest of drawers: head to feet and feet to head.) (I refer to the first dream, in which as symbol of incorporation the ears of the dog were devoured.) Another dream of our patient which also may be reckoned with the group of incorporation dreams is the following: Dream VIII : I am going down the stairs at school; a boy accompanies me. We come upon a dead man lying on the stairs. The boy takes something from the dead man. I ask him to show it to me ; the boy says it was a watch, the like of which is not to be found in the world. Then he shows me the watch. It is spherical in form, the one case of gold, the other of glass. Meanwhile the boy lets the watch fall to the floor. The works fall from the case. The one piece (works or cover?) cannot be found for a long time; finally it is discovered under the door. The similarity of the leading motive with the earlier dream is plain enough. Symbolically the ticking of the costly, unique watch is like the beating of the particular precious heart in question. Functionally, she takes something carefully from an apparently dead man, as in the tunnel. The two covers signify the repression, together with the resistance. The dropping and falling apart of the watch — the threatened self-knowledge and the giving up of the 268 SADISM AND MASOCHISM fiction. Here, too, the patient returns to her childhood, descends. The essential thing, however, is the functional taking to herself of an object which belongs to a defenseless man. Deeper layers we will here pass by : Electra complex, experiences in sleep, and other things.^ Let us now turn to the "red" dreams : Dream IX : I was stopping with my mother at a summer resort. I returned from a walk. I drew near the mirror to straighten my hair. But I stopped suddenly, stared, so astonished and terrified was I at the amazing appearance of my eyes. I came closer to the mirror. I turned myself a little sideways so that I could see better what I had in my eyes. But then I noticed a man who was observing me from without through the window. I covered the window with a cloth and returned to the glass to see what was in my eyes. I saw then that my eyes were full of blood. Heavy drops of blood fell from my eyes. I tried to wipe away the drops of blood with my handkerchief, but the blood kept on coming. As I made a movement with my left eye, the pupil ( ?) came out of the eye and seemed about to fall to the floor. I made various movements to bring it back to its right place. I was in terror and despair and thought, "My God, I shall be blind," and I ordered the chamber- maid to call my mother. My mother came in, began to put the i-oom in order, and sang while doing it. ... I lay upon the divan, sad, without moving. Finally I said: "Mother, just look at my eyes." My mother came closer to me and was astonished at the appearance of my eyes. Interpretation : The patient's melancholia had begun ostensibly with the mother's death. The mother had suffered with her heart for many years, died from this, and spent her last years in bed. The patient was her nurse, was chained to her mother's sickbed, and thus saw her most delightful years pass away, while her feminine charms were fading. The patient had attempted to redeem this sorry situation through an excessive willingness for sacrifice to her dearly loved mother. She was always ready, among other things, to go without sleep for nights at a time. She was not conscious of the conflict which arose from this (death wishes!). Even just before the mother's death the patient objected strongly to an injection of camphor prescribed by the physician because "in such a condition the dose could not be correctly estimated and the CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 269 mother might be poisoned (bipolar attitude. She was afraid that her mother might be saved!). The apothecary had told her that it often happened that the heart was too weak to bear the injec- tion. The patient had first to be removed so that the injection could be given secretly. The next night the mother was dead. The patient had the idea in the morning that the mother was really still quite warm. When they laid her out, she feared that she might be buried alive. The patient once asked me if I had heard of this, and if I believed that once in a while by mistake people who appeared dead were put into the grave alive (uterine fan- tasy?). A year before the mother's death she had become at- tached to a man for the first time and temporarily for the last time. She loved him so much that she confessed her love to him.'' She found no love in return. At her mother's burial her only consolation was that she would certainly find one from "him" among the letters of condolence. Her hope was illusory. He did not write a line. This was the final blow. It became clear to her after the loss of the beloved man and the marriage of her brother that her mother had meant everything to her, and that with her death life had lost all its worth. The melancholia had set in at that time. The associations prove the bipolar attitude toward the mother. She was with her mother once at a summer resort. The mother fell from a donkey upon which she was riding and broke her leg. She had to remain in bed a long time. *'How did this unfortunate accident afifect you ?'* "I was unhappy over it. The sadness took possession of me for the first time then. Or no, it was not at that time." "You had already suffered from the depression?" **No; at that time it was not really depression. The genuine sadness began with my mother's death." "Tell me more exactly about this period of your life." "The first depression appeared during another summer. We were also in the country. The mother was walking alone on the street and was in danger of being run over by an automobile. But she was rescued. That made so fearful an impression upon me that I was 'melancholy' for a month. But that was nothing compared with the present time. At that time I was still happy in life." We see clearly even the first depression as a reaction to the death wish. We might bring the following dream fragments as supplemen- tary aids to the interpretation of these dreams: i. The mother appears in the dream, weeps, and calls her to herself. 2. The dead 270 SADISM AND MASOCHISM mother said to her : **I knew that my illness would not kill me, but that it would slowly ruin my daughter's life." The patient is enlightened in the course of the next sessions con- cerning the unconscious death wishes toward the mother. She categorically rejects every such explanation, but listens with in- terest. The interpretation of the dream must be extended thus. The man who listens is at the same time death, whom she had re- peatedly summoned; the analyst, who sees what is taking place within her; and also her conscience, her conscious instance. The mirror, too, has this last meaning and also stands for the analysis. She covers the window with a curtain (resistance). The final portion of the dream, the mother "began to put the room in order and sang while doing it," while she herself lay sorrowfully upon the divan, has a number of determinants. First we must recognize here an expression of self-scorn. She is not worthy of any one's pity or sympathy in her trouble, so evil are her unconscious im- pulses toward her mother. This is to be seen in the detail that she wipes away the blood, which continues to come. One thinks of Macbeth and the Biblical motive : "For though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked be- fore me. . . * The scene mentioned above denotes in the second place a further self-reproach. The mother believed that everything was in order, well arranged, and had no idea what her daughter close by had in her eyes (her head). Then this most important part of the dream represents an inversion. What the patient wanted to say here she did not trust herself to state plainly even in the dream; there- fore she turns it about. She is not the heartless one, who cares little within about her mother's fate, but the mother does not be- have as a mother should. The mother is heartless (motive of the taking out of the heart and of the broken watch). The patient also becomes heartless through identification with the mother. Then this scene means also preparation for dying. The mother orders her affairs, arranges them for the long, long way, and sings thereby the song that accompanies it, the song of eternity. The patient herself is the dying one; "she lies motionless," and sur- renders to the mother before the journey, confesses everything: "See, Mother, what I have in my eye." The onlooker is also death. The dream in this connection is the Last Judgment. The bleeding eyes stand for her sadistic impulses, for her sadistic in- stinctive attitude toward her mother (see the next dream). The CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 271 precious, the only, the irreplaceable — the pupil, which she loses — would go to a fixation object. It is doubtful whether the be- loved man she mentions is this object for several reasons, which cannot be discussed here, but which have been discovered in the patient's analysis. This love was far rather a fruitless attempt at spontaneous healing, which failed. The summer resort probably is connected with the resort where her complex-determined rela- tion to her mother threatens to break through. It cannot be further discovered whether this dream refers to a definite experience (defloration, through displacement from below to above ; beginning menstruation ; reproduction of an infantile motive), because the patient brings no material to support this probable conjecture. Now for the second dream: Dream X : I find myself upon a balustrade in the second story and am watching what is going on below. Many soldiers are moving in the yard with guns. Two officers then enter leading between them a third officer. The latter is condemned to death, but not as is customary in military tribunals to death by shooting; he is to be guillotined. He is in parade uniform. His face is gloomy, earnest, but beautiful. The executioner is waiting in an adjoining room to behead him. All at once I notice my mother among the soldiers. I ask some one why my mother accompanies the soldiers into the execution room. I am told she wants to dip her right hand into the blood of the condemned man. How can she look on at such a frightful scene? It will break her heart! I cry out. Still the mother goes in. I withdraw and merely hear now that they all call out to my mother that she may do as she pleases. We will bring two more dream fragments to help us in the interpretation: i. The sultan says that I must be willing to be the mother of his six children (the patient has exactly six brothers and sisters). 2. A man asks me whether I will be the mother of his children. As we are talking in the hall, my mother appears in anger and sends me away, tells me I have nothing to do here.® The following associations are only in part attached to this dream ; others arise from further motives in the analysis. — Her father was a reserved man; he never got on very well with her mother. He was somewhat morose. "He never understood me and was really the cause of my not being able to do anything with my craze for music. Our neighbors one time were going to sepa- 272 SADISM AND MASOCHISM rate and sold the furniture of their home. There was among the pieces an old small upright piano. I longed to possess it. I begged my father with tears in my eyes that he would buy the piano for me, but he would not. I used often to shut myself away and sing sorrowfully alone in my room." It was at this time that the patient suf¥ered the aggression from her music teacher. He was an older man. She trusted him. Once he had her come into his sleeping room instead of the instruction room. He embraced her, kissed her, touched her breasts. She was in the first moment stunned, defenseless, without will, then tore herself free. She then to her sorrow gave up all music. (Presumably this teacher has appeared in her memory as a father imago.) The patient was then enticed by a friend to play and touching of the genitals, but she says she rejected these things. References to onanism are frequent in her dreams. But she says she has never practiced onanism. The guillotining leads us to the often-mentioned castration complex (revenge upon the music teacher and her brother ! ) . We must add here two more short dreams, which also refer to the castration complex : 1. I am resting after a long walk upon a hill. Then I see a stick lying there. As I go to pick it up, I notice that it is a snake with its head squeezed off. Then a man approaches who says it is I who have squeezed off the head. 2. I was in the sleeping room and noticed that something was moving under the bed covers. As it crawled forward, it was a snake. I thought to what danger any one is exposed who sleeps here. I took tongs to kill the snake by squeezing off its head. But I realized that the snake could injure me with its tail while I was removing its head. I tried to call a second person, who should meanwhile pinch off the tail. (Fantasy of coitus with three, two women and one man? Fan- tasy of the penis squeezed off during coitus ? The tongs symbolize the legs in connection with the most frequent form of feminine onanism through pressing together of the legs.) We see in the dream mentioned above the castration complex. Yet this dream is much distorted. In the first place she displaces upon the mother, as so often in her dreams, what she herself really wants to do. Through transposing from below to above, cutting off the head signifies castration. The dipping in of the hand relates to the coitus fantasy. The three officers, ''leading CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 273 between them a third officer," plainly depict the male genital. The looking on of her mother, that is, her own looking on, may point to an experience of spying (although it is true the patient cannot recall anything of the kind) upon the basis of which a childish theory of coitus, of course strongly colored sadistically, has been elaborated, for the realization of which she craves. The flowing blood, the pinching ofi of the tail, are constituent parts of this coitus fantasy. The ceremonial preparation for the execution may represent the emotion, the anxiety during the spying. The ad- joining room, the standing high on the balustrade, again signify peeping. She wonders that her mother can thus look on. Then she hears how her mother is called to satisfy her desire. She withdraws, but with a "protesting superiority." This all reminds one of the indignant reaction of growing girls who surprise their parents at coitus. (How can older persons engage in such filthy things?) This voice of forced deprecation is quite clear. She envies the mother, because it is a matter of a quite different execu- tion. Other features run through the dream fabric. Her brother is also an officer. She lets him lose his head on her account, but the mother stands as an obstacle in the way, as everywhere; and then comes a disguised expression of scorn, a desire for revenge directed toward the mother, in a very confused form of utterance. Repetition of a stereotyped motive : She would rather have her brother dead than to have him go to another woman. Let us pass on to the last dream, which reveals the same feature of the sadistically stamped Electra attitude, that of the melan- choliac toward her mother. Dream XI : I find myself in the home of "the" parents and have the feeling that they are my own parents but at the same time utterly strange people. Beyond the window there falls upon me the shadow of my father's daughter, who is moving there. The father, that is, has forbidden her the house; she may not enter it. I go out to com- fort her, despite the father's command. He notices me and slaps me. Then the father divides his money (bank notes) between me and another of his daughters. I receive ten millions, while the other gets twelve. I am indignant at this. Then I notice that the sister is rigid and her face has bright red blood running over it. I feel pity. SADISM AND MASOCHISM Supplementary: As the father handed me the bank notes, he added what was to be purchased with the money; that is, this million for shoes, and so on. Association material: ''You spoke of strange and yet your own parents ; where is the mother in the dream?'* **I do not know ; I did not see my mother." "Were you ever beaten by your parents in reality? Have you been slapped ?'* "No, my father never whipped me, nor my mother either, or only once ; that was really not a slap, but a push on the shoulder. This was on account of my sister. I was very indignant at the time, for I was innocent. I no longer remember the details of the occurrence, but do know that my concern was chiefly that they would not believe me that I was innocent.'* "How old were you at that time ?'* "Ten or twelve years (ten or twelve millions !). I had the same feeling at the time as yesterday in the electric car when the con- ductor would not believe me, but suspected me.'* It is of importance now to mention an occurrence of the day before, which may have the value of a symptomatic action preced- ing the dream. We will reproduce the event just as the patient related it at the beginning of the present hour. She came a whole hour too late (she is generally punctual) and only noticed it when she was already near my house (she had swallowed up the entire hour). In the face of this, the patient de- cided to go for a walk in the Ttirkenschanz park near. But she overlooked the fact that her monthly ticket had run out; the col- lector demanded as a penalty that she pay four times the amount ; she was angry that he would not believe that she "actually" had no intention of abusing her rights. She therefore visited the two cemeteries close by, because she likes to read novels there. Then the patient tells of a passage in a novel, the name of which escapes her, like this: Following a shipwreck, a prince who was among the passengers, and who had his leg broken, is rescued by a girl telegraph operator of the station on the nearest island. The authorities on the island are informed of the prince, who pre- sumal^ly had lost his life, and they will not give credence to the latter's statement regarding his origin ; they are more inclined to believe that he is delirious. We come here upon the family romance. Is she her father's CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 275 daughter? Is she the actual child of her parents? (tendency to destroy the incest barrier "brother-sister!"). She says unexpectedly, her voice trembling: "Do you know what happened last night ? I awoke in the night and found two bedbugs in my bed. I suddenly felt such delight in cruelty that I decided not merely to kill the bedbugs but to torture them. So I took a needle, fastened the two insects to it, and let them lie, meaning to convince myself in the morning whether they . were still alive. But when morning came I found neither needle ;nor bugs. The latter had carried away the needle, and now I ' fear that they will come again with the needle. I was cruel this time, I admit it. I wanted to be cruel." The condensation of this symbolic action remains to be dis- cussed, in its relation also to analysts (Dr. Stekel and I and the two bedbugs ; then the piercing with the needle as killing, as coitus, as binding to myself, and so on). We will return after this digression to Dream XI. Interpretation: The self-same CEdipus attitude is in the dream of the strange parents who are yet her own. She lets the mother be driven from the house by the father. She ostensibly comforts th "older daughter" (mother?), is slapped by the father (displace- ment from beneath to above ; that is, fantasy of congress with the father). The division of the money has to do with the same theme. The second daughter may be her sister, on whose account she received a thrust at her shoulder, and also her mother, who as such is really absent from the dream. She allows the sister- mother figure to bleed, die, and then feels pity for her. The asso- ciations which accompany this dream are much more important, because they grant us a survey of the infantile basis of the para- pathy. The patient seems to have had two sexual objects, father and brother, in chronological succession. The episode with the push in the shoulder which she received because of her sister may be a cover memory related to her attitude toward her mother as rival and obstacle. The feeling of being innocent also shows this character of the cover memory, just as the bipolar attitude toward the mother does. The sense of innocence is in this case identical with the theme mentioned, "not being believed.'* The old conflict with the mother came to a crisis through the illness and had in- dicated in advance the entire parapathic structure. Thus the death of the mother became ostensibly the starting point of the melancholia. The unfortunate love will have been the attempt to 276 SADISM AND MASOCHISM free herself from the fixation after the marriage of her brother (homosexual attitude toward the mother is also present). The sadistic character lends to the parapathy its fundamental tone and repeats itself in the entire picture in the form of individual arabesques. Cruel sadistic fantasies have become the specific con- dition of her sexuality, and upon this basis her other social reac- tions take place. A third early-infantile feature, peculiar to melancholia, reaches still deeper than these two, the family conflict and the sadistic trait. This is the literal, strictly physiological, transformation of the idea of loving into incorporation, devouring, appropriating to oneself, through cannibalistic or absolute identification. This makes difficult the lifting of the repression and impoverishes the ability for projection, both of which should give us points of de- parture for pursuing the particular material repressed, the theme objectively to be considered in the analytic situation. I should like here to call attention simply to one interesting phenomenon which Stekel has called ^'displaced mourning." Her melancholia broke out after the mother's death and might easily be explained from the moral reaction to the death wishes. But we see still another motive : marriage of the be- loved brother. It is very likely that she was deflowered by this brother. Her resistance in the treatment may arise from the conscious determination not to reveal this occurrence. At any rate, her life plan was to share the brother's life! This life purpose could not be accomplished. The depression appeared as a reaction to the loss of the brother. She had sacrificed her mother without having reached her goal.^° I will here break off the patient's history as given by Dr. Harevcn. I saw the patient a month after she had gone away. She was entirely recovered and had become completely extra- verted. She told me of her decision not to marry, but to take a lover. She let it appear plainly that she had much that she wanted to conceal — and is no longer a virgin. Therefore her determination not to marry. This permits us to conclude that she is acting upon the fact of her defloration. I am convinced that we shall frequently come upon the same mechanism in the analyses of melancholiacs : disillusionment in love and fantasies of revenge which follow thereupon. The CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 277 original attitude of hatred of primitive man makes itself felt, is rejected by the moral ego, and a splitting of consciousness is inevitable. The disappointed, deceived, sorrowing heart craves vengeance. This revenge goes even beyond death. The root of many necrophiliac acts is an unsatisfied desire for revenge. Before v^^e turn to these complicated cases I will bring some simple ex- ample. I have already mentioned that there are individuals who miss no opportunity to look upon dead bodies and like to wander about graveyards. Perhaps such an attitude also plays its part in the choice of calling, as I will demonstrate later. The fol' lowing case affords some interesting details : Case Number 42. H. Z., a doctor of philosophy, thirty-four years old, suffers temporary impotence, which is discovered in analysis to be the inhibition of sadistic impulses. He has been for years a firm vegetarian. Meat reminds him of the dead bodies of animals. He has some infantilisms which plainly reveal a canni- balistic root. He chews his nails and is always biting his hands and his lips. Both hands are bitten sore on the same spot. He bites off little particles of skin, which he eats. He is potent only when he can insult the woman, whom he always chooses upon the street. He is always threatening to do something to her. He is roused chiefly by women in mourning. He relates his masturbation fantasy only after long resistance. He has coitus in a death chamber. The woman is weeping over the loss of her husband. He rushes upon her and forces her to coitus. Despite her sorrow, he brings her to the orgasm. His favorite books are King Richard III. and Zola's U Argent. Richard's wooing in the first selection excites him ("Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?") ; in Zola's story, the scene in which a banker takes as his mistress a mourning woman who has just received news of the death of some one dear to her. He likes to go to funerals because they excite him sexually. He looks mostly at the sorrowing women, at which, in spite of internal resistances, he is compelled to masturbate. Analy- sis shows that it is a case of displacement from the dead to the mourner and the fulfillment of an old fantasy: killing the father and taking possession of the mother. He likes to quote Diderot as saying that a man who grew up wild without the influences of civilization would slay his father and do violence to his mother. 278 SADISM AND MASOCHISM Fantasies also of coitus performed in a coffin can be traced back to reading of sexual literature of this sort. Those instances are familiar in which animals are employed for the expression of the sadistic impulses. We have our- selves reported (Volume V) such a case. Men bring animals to brothels to do to animals what they would not dare to do to the woman Kothe (''Sodomy and Sadism with Animals/* Berl. tierdrstL Wochenschrift, 1914, Vol. 30; Rev. Zthl. f.d. ges. Neurol., 1915, Vol. II, p. 71) had an opportunity to witness a case of sodomy and seven cases of sadism with animals. All the cases were at- tributable to the fact that the olYenders were under the influence of alcohol. The case of sodomy concerned a pig, most of the cases of sadism (five) were of mares, one was a heifer, and one a bitch. This last case was plainly reminiscent of a lust murder. The dog was killed by having its throat cut, the abdominal cavity was opened in the middle line from the sacral cartilage for about twenty centimeters so that the intestines and omentum protruded from the opening. There were a number of incisions with a knife on i)oth the right and left sides of the thoracic region. The incisions in belly and skin showed no bloody borders. The case was spoken of by the author as a sexual sadism, although spermatozoa were not found in the genitals nor was there any violent injury of the genital to be demonstrated. The next case furnishes a contribution to this theme : Case Number 43. F. J"., a medical student, twenty-four years old, is conscious of his sadistic attitude toward woman. The mere sight of blood rouses him. His greatest satisfaction would be to bite a woman and drink her blood. He has only one possible way in which he can transform his craving to reality. He per- forms cunnilingus on menstruating women. A prostitute whom he frequently visits for this purpose told him that she has some regu- lar customers who take pleasure in the same passion. It is worthy of note from the story of his childhood that he was sexually ex- cited through his mother's urine. At five years old he tasted her urine and later did this with particular pleasure if it was polluted with menstrual blood. He tried as a child to catch young chickens and wring their necks. He attempted also to tear them apart. He sometimes drank the blood of the dismembered animals. CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 279 It is interesting that he is perpetually occupied with death. He has sketched his own announcement a hundred times and de- vised all sorts of such cards for the various members of the family. He was horrified, when dissecting for the first time in anat- omy, that he suddenly had an erection because the corpse was naked. He had an impulse to dissect the genital first, but did not do it because he was ashamed before his colleagues. These erections appear when he is watching surgeons and gynecologists operate. The sight of large wounds also excites him sexually. He is thinking of giving up medicine. Analysis is rejected by him as useless, for he considers his condition congenital. He will perhaps have himself castrated, but he has not yet had the courage to renounce his manhood. The necrophiliac tendencies do not always appear so plainly. Sometimes one sees them coming to light after the death of some beloved person. There are historical examples (in the Hapsburg family) that men were not able to separate them- selves from the coffin of the beloved wife and even took it with them upon their journeys. (Compare also Goethe's poem, The Bride of Corinth and Burger's Leonore.) One man told me in analysis that he was tortured with erections when he kept the death watch at the bier of his wife. The temptation to take possession of her was so great that he fled from the room in order not to yield to it. It is characteristic that for a year he visited her grave almost every day and even to-day carries on a great sepulchral worship. Another person takes advantage of funerals in order to press against women and so obtain an orgasm. The orgasm usually appears when the coffin is low- ered into the grave. In his dreams he is often having inter- course with persons who are dead. They seem to him alive in the dream, but still it is as if he knew that they are dead, for he wonders in the dream that he is having sexual relation since they are already dead. Dr. Zygmund Siegel related to me the following observation from his practice: Case Number 44. I was with a sick woman yesterday who has already asked my advice three times. (I prescribed in the first two consultations in the old manner.^^) She has vomited every- thing for a month continuously with the exception of certain 28o SADISM AND MASOCHISM piquant foods, so for the first time I prescribed : Cocaine + Aqua chloroformant. satur. + Spir. menth. and the second time : Natr. sulfur, crist. puriss. + Aqua laure + Aqua foenic. All without result. Only yesterday, when I had been called the third time, did I look for the ''motor" with the patient. She has been a widow for three years. She was married to a lawyer of this town, X. Her husband was almost always ill, impotent, and she was really only his nurse. She is fifty-three years old. For eight years suffering from arthritis deformans. She was once very pretty. Was ad- mired by the whole town for her beautiful hair. She is outwardly religious, devout, goes to church every day. She has always thought her illness would go to her stomach and so cause her death. She is childless. Just a month ago she dreamed that she saw her husband, he embraced her, kissed her, lay down with her in bed and performed regular coitus, as never in life, and which ended for both of them in an indescribable orgasm. She awoke early with serious nausea and had the impression that she had been made pregnant by the dead husband. "Think of it. Doctor !" she said, ''sleeping with a dead person, being impregnated by a dead man, and bearing a child at the age of fifty-three; is that not horrible, is it not disgusting; would one not vomit?" I obtained this confession from the woman after various search- ing remarks and much cross-questioning, a confession such as I have never before heard from any patient ! I quieted my patient and left her in a good frame of mind. We see here a typical example of a necrophiliac act in a dream, in which a wish fulfillment plays a part. She remains faithful to her husband; she does nothing contrary to the laws of the Church and of morality; but she experiences at last what she has never before experienced, a complete orgasm ; she becomes pregnant and is no longer alone. We will turn to some older cases well known in literature, but which have not hitherto been explained analytically. Dr. Epaulard gives in his work Le Vampyrisme (Lyons, 1901) a penetrating description of the case of "Sergeant Ber- trand" (Observation XIV) which affords one of the most in- teresting contributions to the problem of the paraphilias. Case Number 45. The outer life of B. is briefly as follows: Born in Voisey (Haute Marne), 1822. He comes of a good CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 281 peasant family. One brother is living and is healthy. Two chil- dren have died. The inheritance is questionable only in respect to a maternal uncle, who was mentally ill when he died. B. himself was never seriously ill. He was very sensitive to new impressions as a child, and also very excitable. He went first to the seminary, until he entered the army. He rose to the position of sergeant. Was considered a good soldier and had a rather large independence also as paymaster. He got on well with the people with whom he had to do. He was religious; at least he did not permit others to ridicule such things and also did not like obscene talk. He was chivalrous to- ward women. But while he seemed outwardly respected and vir- tuous, even very praiseworthy, his sexual impulse led him along declivitous paths. He masturbated from his earliest childhood. He began to dream of women from his eighth or ninth year. From this time on he began to be strange. He would flee to the most retired portion of a wood and remain there the whole day in deep depression. And this would happen once or twice a week. He masturbated as often as eight times a day when he was thirteen or fourteen. But even the sight of a piece of feminine clothing would excite him. His onanism fantasy was as follows: "I imagined I sat in a room where I had women in my power. After I had gratified myself with them and entertained myself by torturing them in every conceivable way, I imagined them as dead and committed upon their bodies every sort of desecration." "The thought of seeing men's bodies mutilated was very rare." And then he always had a repugnance to that. "Since I had no human corpses I sought for the bodies of ani- mals, which I mutilated just as I did later human bodies. I slit open the belly and tore out the entrails. Then I looked at them and performed onanism. The end always was that I went away and in fearful shame promised myself I would never do it again. But the impulse was always stronger than my will. Thus I treated the bodies of animals of every size, from a horse to cats and small dogs." In 1846, at the age of twenty-four, B. began to use living ani- mals. Three times he caught a dog, killed it, and then, as with the dead animals, tore out the entrails with great sensations of pleasure. At the end of 1846 he had already reached the idea of disinter- 282 SADISM AND MASOCHISM ring human bodies. But it was not until 1847 that he carried out the thought. He himself describes the first grave robbery. He was walking with a friend at midday when they came by chance to the ceme- tery of their garrison. A half-filled grave gave him the oppor- tunity under some pretext to leave the friend and return later to the grave, which the gravediggers had not yet filled. In the most horrible excitement, without thinking that he might be seen, it was in broad daylight, he tore open the grave with the shovel and began in a frenzy, for want of another instrument, to strike into the dead body with the shovel. He made such a noise that a workman who was busy near the graveyard came in curiosity to the entrance. When B. saw him, he laid himself close to the dead body in the grave and remained quiet for a short time. While the workman was bringing the authorities, he covered the corpse again and ieft the cemetery by the wall. Trembling and bathed in cold per- spiration, he sat in a small wood for hours, in a state of stupefac- tion. Then he awoke from his paralyzed condition: all his limbs were as if beaten black and blue and his head ''quite weak." Two days later he dug out the grave once more with his hands, but now on a rainy night. His hands were bleeding, but he dug until he had the lower part of the body exposed ; he rent it in pieces and then closed the grave once more. Now the necrosadistic acts followed at shorter or longer inter- vals and he masturbated in five instances two or three times each, when he would touch with his left hand the viscera or some other part of the body. This was in June and July, 1847. In November, 1847, after a long abstinence, for the first time he disinterred a body and performed coitus. The body was that of a sixteen-year-old girl. The ecstasy was terrific ; for a quarter of an hour he tried upon her all the arts of love which he used with his living mistresses, as if she, too, were alive. Then he mutilated her like the others. In March, 1848, he has coitus with four dead women. His instinct finds new forms of expression. He splits the mouth of the corpse, cuts off the limbs, and leaves no portion of the body whole. He wants to hack to pieces and contort the severed parts ("I wanted completely to annihilate them!"), and at the end he again performs onanism. He was shot at on the sixth of November, as he was climbing the wall. Yet this did not deter him from his goal. For the first time he cut out the genitals and slit open the CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 283 left leg. "The satisfaction was greater than before." After this last case, which, to be sure, was soon followed by his arrest, his impulse, as he said, began to abate. He had also dug up a number of men, which happened however, as he said, by mistake, especially in the burying ground for sui- cides, when he was on the search for women's bodies. He once had to disinter twelve or fifteen men before he found a woman. He gave them in his rage perhaps a blow with the saber, but never masturbated ; on the contrary, he felt disgust. He denied quite emphatically that he had ever bitten the corpses, as an expert had stated. It is interesting that B. had intercourse with girls wherever he was in garrison, whom he always "satisfied" completely. Different ones wanted to marry him. When then the impulse came, which was perhaps every fourteen days, and announced itself with head- ache, he would follow his necrosadistic (necrophiliac) cravings. Nothing could stop him. Shots from the watchmen, automatic guns which were set for him, the worst weather, the swimming of moats in midwinter, lying by the hour in icy cold and wet, nothing could hold him back. He was finally so severely wounded by an automatic gun, which went off as he was about to climb the cemetery wall, that he was apprehended ; and the desecration of the graves, which had been an evil rumor for some time, was explained. He frankly admitted everything under the influence of the surgeon who was caring for him, Marchal de Calvi, even that he was not at all sure that he would not do the same thing again. He kept stating also that the destruction of the bodies, not coitus, had been his chief motive. I call attention principally to the severe fits of depression in this case. They help us to understand the psychogenesis of the depressions, which represent a reaction of the "moral ego" against the "instinct ego." ("I weep because I am dissatisfied with my- self.") The ideal ego rejects the impulses which are pressing for- ward to action. ("But I weep also because I realize that my wishes cannot be fulfilled. . . .") It is very likely that he accomplished his necrosadistic acts in an epileptic seizure. Some details of his account point to this: "It was midday. I was walking with a companion in the coun- try. We went out of curiosity to the cemetery, which lay along the road. Some one had been buried the day before. A sudden shower had driven away the gravediggers, so that they could not SADISM AND MASOCHISM complete their work and had left their tools lying near the grave. At sight of this the darkest thoughts came into my mind ; / felt severe pains in my head, my heart beat almost to bursting ; I was no longer master of my senses. I sought a pretext to go into the city, got rid of my companion, and hastened back to the graveyard. Without paying any attention to the laborers at work in a neigh- boring vineyard, I seized a shovel and opened the grave with an activity of which I should not have been capable at any other moment. I had already dragged out the body. In the absence of any other instrument sharp enough for the mutilation of the corpse, I grabbed the shovel and with a fury which I cannot ex- plain to myself I beat upon the body. The noise attracted the notice of one of the laborers. I hid myself in the hole. He hastened to the city to inform the authorities. I took advantage of this moment, covered the corpse again with earth, and sprang over the wall. '7 trembled in my whole body. Cold sweat broke from every pore. I fled into a wood near by. Despite the rain, which had been faUing for some hours, I lay down in some bushes, and remained in this position from noon until three o'clock in a state of com- plete insensibility. When I awoke from this stupefaction, my limbs felt as if they had been pounded and my head was very weak. This condition always returned when I had undergone an attack of the madness. "The seizure would overtake me as a craving to destroy. It came every fourteen days and began with severe headache. "Two days later I returned at midnight to the graveyard. This time I found no tools and dug with my hands. They bled, but nothing could stop me ; I felt no pain. I could not free more than the lower part of the body; I tore it to pieces and then closed the grave with my hands." We see clearly that he finds himself in a pathological aflfective frenzy. W^e shall have more to say concerning this frenzy in the chapter on epilepsy. On other occasions he masturbated several times near the corpse, which shows us that some other passion lurked behind his necrophilia. He does not want merely to dis- member dead bodies; he wants to have intercourse with them. He says of the orgasm which he experienced with the act of desecration : "I cannot describe what I felt at this moment ; no de- light that I had ever known with a living woman could compare with this pleasure !" A concealed homosexuality betrays itself in his behavior toward CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 285 male corpses. He wounds some portion of the body with his saber (castration), but he does not resort to onanism. On the contrary, he feels a great loathing. His conduct toward women is interesting. He says : "I have always loved women madly ; I have permitted no one to insult them in my presence. I have everywhere had young and charming women as mistresses, whom I have completely satisfied and who have yielded very willingly to me. As proof of this, some, although of rich and distinguished family, have wanted to follow me. I have never touched a married woman. Indecent talk has always offended me. I always tried to bring the con- versation to another channel, when such a theme was broached in my presence. I was brought up strictly religious ; I have always cared for religion and defended it, but without fanaticism. "I have always loved to destroy. My parents would give me no toys when I was a child, because I broke them to pieces. In later years I could never keep any object, even a pocketknife, longer than fourteen days. Then I would ruin it. It seems to me that I would buy a whistle in the morning and break it in the evening or the next day. Once in the army I came to my room drunk and broke everything to bits that I could reach." This case cannot be explained psychologically. The cir- cumstance that a brother and sister had died when he was still a child might perhaps throw a light upon his condition. Chil- dren are often jealous of the brother or sister who has died, when they observe that the parents mourn for it. One of my patients, who revealed this jealousy of a dead sister, had a dream which reminds us of the deeds of the patient just dis- cussed : I find myself in a churchyard. The atmosphere is gloomy and mysterious. It is raining in torrents. It is as if my mother were there. I hear her weeping and sobbing. "Why are you crying so?" "Because you are a naughty child. Your sister would not have treated me so badly." I am seized with an unspeakable rage. I throw myself upon the tombstone and wrench it out with super- human power. There are flowers on the grave. I tear these to bits . . . and awaken with a pollution.^^ The fear which many parapathics have of the dead and of the vengeance of the dead corresponds to necrosadistic in- 286 SADISM AND MASOCHISM stincts. The terror of savages of the revenge of the dead is also a testimony to this, so well described by Levy-Briihl. One will find in such cases a pronounced fear of spirits and ghosts, which is a self-defense against necrophiliac acts. The case history which my assistant Dr. Miroslav Schlesin- ger places at my disposal brings us an interesting contribution to this problem. At Dr. Stekel's request I bring in a brief form the analysis of a parapathy which I carried out under his guidance: Case Number 46. Mr. J. L., a student at the college of inter- national trade. Twenty-one years of age. Somatic findings en- tirely negative. Patient states the difficulties which led him to consult a physician : his head distresses him constantly ; his think- ing is not clear. He has the feeling as if something were revolving in his head ; incapable of any concentrated work. He is always brooding at his studies, although he is not always aware of what he is thinking. But it draws him compulsively into the world of dreams. He has in his whole body the feeling "of an inner fric- tion and a tension," which he cannot more closely define. He sleeps restlessly and broods even in his sleep. The condition many times becomes intolerable. Then he hastens to the street and runs about aimlessly as if he had something pressing to attend to. He studies only with the most supreme effort of the will, obliged to struggle with strong feelings of displeasure. He is occupied with suicidal thoughts and will shoot himself if analysis does not deliver him from his tormenting states. His day fantasies are mostly dreams of ambition and power. He has had one goal in mind for years : to attain to higher intel- lectual ability so that he can accomplish something stupendous or make some great invention ; he wants to achieve something special 'in life. The thought of being a mere professional person and sub- mitting to the banalities of every day makes him helpless with rage. He feels the inadequacy of his personality for realizing his ideals. This makes him unhappy and incapable of life. He sufYers fright- fully from his sense of inferiority. He is plagued with doubt whether he has chosen the right path. Everything that he does leaves him dissatisfied ; he always has the feeling that he is missing the essential in life, that which makes it really worth living. His studies seem to him trivial and unimportant. — So much for our patient's condition at the beginning of the analysis. Family conditions : The patient is a village boy. His father, a CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 287 village merchant, professes a world philosophy which is free, non- religious. The inhabitants of the village are all strictly Catholics and openly disapprove of his father's irreligious attitude. The patient's mother, a very bigoted woman, brought up her son from his earliest childhood strictly according to the laws of the Catholic Church. The patient soon noticed the contrast in the father's and mother's relation to the Church. The marital disputes which arose on this ground were not concealed from him. They could not help being fateful for his psychic life. The patient is the second-oldest son. He has besides two younger brothers and two younger sisters. The existence of the two youngest was kept from me until the third month of the analysis. Questioned as to the reason for this secrecy, the patient thought he was ashamed of them. After the birth of the second youngest sister he fled from the parental home (at nine years), broke into tears, and screamed : *Tt is a shame to have so many children in one home!" This period was a turning point in his life and the beginning of his parapathy. We will briefly summarize the most important events of his life up to this moment : The patient's memory goes back to his fourth year. His first recollection is a sexual experience with his child nurse. He awoke one night lying upon the girl, who was playing with his penis. He later often had death wishes toward this maid. His maternal grandmother died about this time. The patient remembers very well having said at that time: "My mother has died, for every- thing which belongs to my mother, belongs also to me. I and my mother are one." Although such an utterance attributed to a four-year-old child needs much reconstruction as to psychology and form of expression, it does nevertheless seem to betray a strong identification with the mother. He slept in the same bed with his mother at that time and had the thought of dying with her, so that neither should outlive the other. He often behaved in bed so aggressively that he had to be reprimanded. In the later years there was a random promiscuity in the sleeping customs be- tween parents and children. The patient passed through a child- hood with the village children rich in sexual play of all sorts. There was a general attempt, among other things, to have coitus with the earth, for they bored holes in the earth and then imitated coitus. Memories of mutual onanism, homosexual scenes, fellatio, and so on come to his consciousness without particular resistance. He believed according to his infantile sexual theory that children 288 SADISM AND MASOCHISM arose from "the foam on the water." He received sexual enhght- enment from his playmates in his seventh year. Remorseful thoughts appeared at about his eighth year as a result of plays of a sexual nature, and they grew more severe. The religious con- science began to set up its veto. He turned away completely in his ninth and tenth years from his previous manner of life. He went to the city, where he attended the gymnasium and lived at a boarding house with strict CathoHc methods of discipHne. His mental conflict, which broke through for the first time with the scene of jealousy at the birth of his sister, was made ever keener through his religious conscience and manifested itself in an ever- increasing number of parapathic actions and symptoms. He chastened himself in the first form of the gymnasium by slipping stones into his bed to prepare himself a hard couch, for a long time did without his evening meal, and so on. As a con- sequence of reading a book of enlightenment, a syphilophobia made its appearance and with it fear of insanity. Thoughts of hatred toward his father, upon whom he put the blame for his weak physical condition, appeared and established themselves vith the gratuitous assumption that he had inherited syphilis from his father. Soon the mania for brooding and speculating set in, which began with doubt of the existence of God. This doubt, which his religious conscience necessarily conceived as something vulgar and unclean, seems to have found its parapathic expression in his syphilophobia. It was the atheist father who had "infected" him with doubt of the existence of God. The tendency to specula- tion gradually extended itself to all problems of life, became more and more distressing, attaining in his seventh class at the gym- nasium to an almost unbearable degree. The warning of an uncle against onanism seems to have played a large part at the turning point in the patient's life already men- tioned (ninth to tenth year). The uncle extracted from him the promise to give up masturbation. The patient apparently was able to abstain until the fifth form in the gymnasium. Then the same uncle came again one day and bade him, on the ground that he wanted to discover from his semen whether he had kept his word or not, to show him his penis. The patient dared not resist, believing also in the possibility suggested, and was the victim of a severe sexual attack. The uncle produced ejaculation manually. His cultivated asceticism collapsed from this day on. The patient could no longer withstand the impulse to onanism; on the other hand he reproached himself most bitterly; in short, he fell into the CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 289 typical psychic conflict concerning onanism. He succeeded in sup- pressing the masturbation after a fearful struggle lasting for years, and then felt worse than ever. It is worthy of remark in connection with his onanism that the patient had the habit of counting while performing it. He saw in the number reached when the ejaculation came the measure of his sexual power. The association of counting with sexual activity arose in the period of his infantile sexual play, when the children during the partner's fellatio would count so that their own turn would not be shortened. He often had to pray also during the act of masturbation. We see how closely his sexual activity is bound with religion. The reverse was also true : he would be praying, become suddenly weary of it, and turn instead to reading the Bible or to obsessive counting, when erotic pictures would force themselves before him. He conducts himself as a stranger toward his brothers and sisters ; he speaks hardly a word with them. The following dreams reveal plainly his attitude toward them : I am at home and considering whether I shall be caught if I put my youngest sister out of the world. From a longer dream : . . . Her son was an officer; I felt vexed and envious at this. We were not on good terms. It should be mentioned with this dream fragment that his brother was an officer. He is jealous of his brother who manages affairs at home. He often thinks: "If you amount to nothing, you will look after your mother's farmyard. It is a blessed work to till the earth in the sweat of one's brow." He has a great longing for the soil. **The labor of the fields is the only true work ; everything else is of lesser value and stability, while the earth is eternal." The patient lives in constant anxiety for the welfare of his father's soul, fears for him the everlasting tortures of hell, and considers himself called to save him from them. He promised to pray a quarter of an hour every day for his father's salvation and to become a priest. His relation to his father has always been a very strained one : fear of his authority and sternness kept him always at a certain distance from him. A large part of his thought life has been occupied with the attitude of his father toward re- ligion. He bore in his heart the profound belief in the dogmas and commands of the Church which his mother had implanted SADISM AND MASOCHISM in him. His father's example sowed the corrupting poison of doubt in his soul and gave him the material for the building up of his parapathy. Nevertheless, he is always anxiously waiting for his father to go to confession that the uncomfortable atmosphere which has lain between his father and the other inhabitants may be dissipated. Death thoughts concerning the father have appeared. He wished at the beginning of the war that the latter would go and never come back. His father had to join the colors soon after this and was away from home several years. Those were precisely the years in which his parapathy became fully developed. Behind the severe religious struggle in which he found himself was the primary psychic conflict : the CEdipus complex. Day fantasies of being the deliverer of his fatherland and sacrificing himself for the welfare of his country are attempts due to the law of talion to displace his attitude to the father upon a social goal. He con- sidered his mother always a saint, "like the Mother of God." It was his mother's wish that he should be a priest, and he saw in the priesthood the ideal for his future. The mother forced his asceti- cism upon him through a vow that he would not marry during her lifetime. He promised to become a priest, since he hoped in this way most readily to obtain the salvation of his father's soul. He slowly conquered his conscious religiousness under the in- fluence of a world view depending on natural science; he stopped confession and prayer. Yet the faith of his youth is indestructibly rooted deep in his emotional life. He often is suddenly compelled to pray. He has a second secret guiding purpose beside that of becoming a farmer : to be a priest. This is the reason he has no pleasure in his studies; for this reason he cannot do concentrated work. He lives in the belief in a great historical mission. He underrates his life from the standpoint of this fiction and can find no satisfaction in it. Having still a great task to perform, the thought of being a mere professional man is intolerable. The essential core of his great task and historical mission becomes slowly visible during the analysis. More and more clearly the picture unrolls itself of an extensive Christ and saint parapathy. The patient catches himself on sleepless nights in hypnagogic hallu- cinations in which he is awaiting a revelation. A voice shall tell him what he is to do. (He does not however hear voices.) He believes himself Christ, and his great task is the deliverance of mankind. The following day fantasy plainly reveals his secret delusion : I see in the yard at home a candelabra; I hang upon it. The CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 291 blood flows from my nose and mouth. Suddenly I am drawn up higher and higher ; I am dead and am changed to a dazzling crystal. The fantasy speaks for itself : He is Christ on the cross and is enacting the Golgotha scene and Christ's ascension. His pure Christ soul finds symbolic expression in the dazzling crystal. "I see ... at home" shows us the source of this fantasy. He often has the feeling of an extraordinary power and believes he can lift himself into the air. A part of his dreams become compre- hensible only when one knows that they repeat Biblical scenes. The following dream among others : A stream. I wanted to go to the other side. A wagon with horses stood in the middle of the stream and prevented me from passing through the water. I come to the wagon and have the feeling that I will now drown. I support myself on a staff and go quickly over the water, dipping my stafif in and drawing it OUt.^3 He has superhuman powers. Like Christ he, too, can pass over the water. His instinct (wagon and horses) is felt as an obstacle between him and the other shore (true religion). The dream brings him at last a wish fulfillment. He often dreams of water and flood ; it may be that this is connected with the wish he often had as a child : to come once more into the world. The elaboration of this wish leads to the fiction of living still unborn in the mother's womb. A number of dreams and day fantasies support the as- sumption that he is given to uterine fantasies. In bed he creeps entirely under the covers ; sleeps rolled up like a hedgehog. A large number of the fantasies which relate to this will be men- tioned later. He has suffered sometimes melancholiac states. Then a "feeling of mournful well-being like the memory of some vanished loveliness" comes over him. He brings a plain dream of the mother's body with obvious symbolism: A cellar in my uncle's house. Behind, a dark and fearsome grotto. I was reading a book there in which was the history of this grotto : "A savage lord dwelt here in hoary antiquity ; he lived here his life long." I wanted to get out and reached after a wooden handle on the wall so that I could swing myself out. It was dangerous. All my brothers have come out quietly ; I only wonder that it is so painful to me. I call the older brother to help me, swing myself energetically. The handle moves. My brother warns me to be careful, for the handle is the memorial of my uncle's first Mass. His granduncle was a priest. He was his ideal. The grotto 292 SADISM AND MASOCHISM is at the same time functionally the symbol of his religious para< pathy, which protects him from the sinful dangers of life. His present life is a pain to him. He would Hke to be born again, come out from the place from which his brothers came forth sound. He would like to know the history (family romance) of his mother (grotto). Still more concealed impulses come to light as the analysis proceeds. The patient reveals himself as a strong sadist and necrophiliac. He likes to take solitary walks in graveyards ; there he feels very well. He remembers a dream in which he was desecrating the body of a dead aunt. He has day fantasies of going to graveyards, digging up graves, violating women to the sound of music. He had as a child the torturing fantasy of lying shut up in a cofifln and fighting for air, of being buried alive, and the like. Here the necrophiliac fantasies are joined to those of the mother's womb. He has the sensation with headaches as if a marble slab were pressing upon his head. He fantasies a scene in which he is buried with a revolver, shoots through the earth above him to obtain air (fantasy of tearing open the womb from within). He wants to be buried in a primeval forest between water and trees and dream on there in semiconsciousness. The following dreams betray unmistakable necrophiliac com- plexes : Dream: Am going by a graveyard. It is unevenly sunken to- ward the middle; it is not inclosed. Close by a cultivated field. Large potatoes are lying on the ground near the cemetery. Then I think of the Last Judgment, when all the dead will go toward the center of the graveyard. So then: "Is it not frightful that the graveyard is not sur- rounded by a fence ?" And the dead bodies serve as fertilizer for the potatoes. Then I go upon the field and think how unfruitful this field is ; nothing at all grows here. The affect in the dream lies in the fact that the graveyard is not inclosed. The dreamer revolts against the endopsychic per- ception that the safeguard (fence) against his necrophiliac im- pulse is wanting. Dominated by his necrophiliac complexes, he neglects his other intellectual interests that lie outside this complex (graveyard). ''How unfruitful this field is" : the patient is so ab- sorbed in his daydreams that he has no time left for his studies. This mental ground bears no fruit. Only the fruit fertilized by CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 293 the necrophiliac complex (dead bodies) grows (large potatoes). Ditam: The body of a girl is laid in a coffin. About her stand her youngest brother, several boys, and I. As we were about to place the cover over her, the youngest brother drew a diary from under the cover and remarked: ''I had almost left my life history there." The rooting of his infantile history in the necrophiliac com- plex is revealed by this dream. He is not only Christ ; he is also Satan. The law of bipolarity is very beautifully manifest in his Christ parapathy. He also identifies himself with the devil, as the fol- lowing fantasy shows : At the head of a company of devils, I am storming a city, L., and I make myself the sole ruler. I take venge- ance on all those in authority, former professors and priests. The professor of mathematics has to instil the whole of mathematics into a deaf person. Priests must learn naughty books by heart. The most alluring nudities stimulate their senses, while, securely bound, they suffer the tortures of Tantalus. Straps are cut from their skin, my parents are beaten, persons are tread upon, and so on. All sins which are called such in the Bible are put into action under my leadership. Churches are profaned, transformed into stalls, money markets, and brothels. Suddenly my illegitimate son appears (I have none) and takes over the authority himself. The last bit of the fantasy betrays the secret family romance : doubt of paternity and the thought of taking the father's place. Inasmuch as he identifies himself with Christ, he is of course the son of God. His cruelty expresses itself also in the dreams : Plunge into rushing water and am afraid of going over a water- fall or coming under a mill wheel. Being broken on a wheel, we see, also occupies his fantasy. A number of promises have so far been mentioned. I might summarize all his vows and oaths, which have brought his life to a chaotic system of obsessions : 1. Vow to become a priest if he is cured of his brooding specu- lations. 2. Vow to become a priest if he is delivered from his fear of syphilis. 3. Vow to become a priest in order to save the father from hell. 4. Vow to cut off his little finger if he does not cease mas- turbating (castration!). 5. Vow to say a paternoster for every curse. 294 SADISM AND MASOCHISM 6. Vow to renounce woman and live chastely if he succeeds in accomplishing some great thing. 7. Vow to have intercourse only with his own wedded wife. 8. Vow to live singly as long as his mother lives. 9. Vow to build a chapel if Hfe fulfills for him his ideals. 10. Vow to devote his life solely to the salvation of his father's soul. 11. Vow to repeat daily a (extra) paternoster if the father goes to confession. 12. Vow to pray a quarter an hour a day in case he gets well. 13. Vow to remain abstinent for three years in order to spare his semen. Our patient suffered from the irreparable division in the parents' point of view. He wanted to make a synthesis of these two atti- tudes in his psyche. This failed. He himself was lacking in the force to take his stand upon either side. The following dream makes this situation plain : A fierce fight is raging in our village. I flee to the graveyard and lie down in a deep grave to await the end of the struggle. It is the conflict between faith and free thought, which is always going on silently in the parental home. He is unable to choose either side and waits to see what fate will bring. His permanent state of tension, his inability to work, and his lack of decision can be readily understood through the complexes analyzed. His brooding is really a masked prayer. He began with doubt of the existence of God, with which he attempted to discharge the compulsion to prayer. His promise to pray for a quarter of an hour daily he felt as a burden. He substituted for it reading from holy books and later speculating over religious questions ; that is, he metamorphosed his praying into brooding. He has often felt that thinking means as much as praying for "thinking means know- ing God's wisdom." The pleasure reward through his complexes, the powerful effect of his vows, constitute serious hindrances in the process of cure. He succeeds but slowly in extricating himself from the thicket. His secret asceticism prevents his happiness. He is afraid to learn the complete truth, as the quotation he brings me from Less- ing discloses : *Tt is better to be seeking the truth one's life long than to find it." However, the investigation of his fictions and the withdrawal from his day fantasies succeeded for the most part so far that he drew nearer to actual life. The future has still to prove his ability to live. CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 295 The patient had spent four months previous to this analysis with Marcinowski, where he was analyzed three times a week. He came to Vienna in a somewhat improved condition. The brood- ing had receded, the fear of the consequences of onanism was gone, but he could not yet study. The analysis seemed at first to have but little result. It was the resolving of the religious conflict, the demonstration that he had brought himself through the vows into impossible situations (Stekel: the hard labor of the parapathy) which brought relief by degrees. The discovery of his necro- philiac impulses produced a sudden change. One characteristic familiar to students of sexuality is con- nected with necrophilia. There are persons who develop their greatest potency in the graveyard. (Perhaps the ancient cus- tom of erecting a phallus upon the grave as a symbol of the life that conquers death has a necrophiliac component. The tombstone has arisen from a transformation of the phallus.) Even as a student in the gymnasium I had repeated oppor- tunity to observe that soldiers took their sweethearts to the cem- etery. I thought at that time the explanation was that they were undisturbed there. But it seems as if the necrophiliac in- stincts must have played a part. One often comes upon necrophiliac impulses in dreams, but so concealed that they usually escape the analyst. Here the phy- sician's intuition has to enter. The necrophiliac material ap- pears then from the associations. A beautiful example might be given from these last days : Case Number 47. A physician who is being treated by me because of ejaculatio prcpcox has a pollution dream. These dreams are, as we know, of the greatest importance. They reveal to us the sexual lower voices that appear as hindrances to potency. The dream is worthy of note in every respect and reads : I find myself upon the ocean. I am to go upon a war vessel. The mighty vessel lies without upon the open sea. It has no masts and there seems to be no machinery. In order to reach the ship, one has to pass over a long mole and then board a small boat, which will bring one to the ship. Two vessels are lying before the mole, which have to be passed in order to reach the latter. Upon the first ship, which I board, there is a girl to whom I pay no attention. I go over the deck and find myself suddenly in the water. The 296 SADISM AND MASOCHISM water comes to my knees. Some one says: ''Formerly the girl's father pressed any one's trousers when they had been wet ; to-day he is too proud to do it." I go back to the shore ; the girl follows me. Suddenly the ships disappear, and a tongue of land thrusts itself into the harbor. I see upon this piece of land a splendid procession. First ministrants with banners, then a baldachin, a priest bearing a monstrance, then many people, all somber in cere- monial garments. Then I see a coffin. I press backward close to the girl and awake with a pollution and a strong orgasm. It is impossible for me to give here the entire analysis. I will merely reproduce those details which lead us to our theme. The girl is the daughter of a tailor who fitted out the patient with his military uniforms. The tailor had a charming little daughter, who was ten or twelve years old when the patient first saw her. He returned after five years and found a blooming beauty. The tailor gave him to understand that he would be very glad to marry his daughter to a doctor. He is rich, and the girl would receive a handsome dowry. The tailor long ago retired from business ; he no longer needs to press trousers. The girl has died. The patient is married and has various difficulties in his marriage, although his wife is an excellent person. But he is enamored of buxom figures ; his wife was well formed as a bride, but she is now frightfully thin. He has her die in the dream. It is her funeral that he sees here. This burial is for him a festival. He cele- brates it in his own manner. The ship without mast or machinery represents functionally his hopes. He wants after the analysis to begin a new life, to make a name for himself as an analyst; wants to devote himself to an academic career. But he feels that he is a wreck. Will he be able to carry out his plans ? It struck me that the patient is committing an act of blasphemy. He gratifies himself by watching a procession. Starting from this point, I inquired as to his attitude toward dead bodies. It ap- peared that in the war he could never look upon the corpses. He had fear and horror of them. Dissection also (especially in patho- logical anatomy) was an abomination to him. He is very kind as a physician with the sick and wounded. Inspection of the dead is a burden to him, and he gets out of this duty as often as he can. The sight of the dead in the war was harder for him to bear than the cries of the severely wounded. Now comes a remarkable association. He went with his parents on an excursion into a neighboring town. They saw there a funeral procession and heard that it was the body of a woman who CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 297 had been murdered by her husband. It was a peasant, who had killed his wife in an open toilet while she was attending to her defecation. He thrust a sharp stake into her from below, into the rectum or vagina. This event had greatly occupied the boy, who was ten years old at the time, and given him much to think of. He then comes to speak of his fear of graveyards and recalls that as a student he had frequently visited the graveyard with his first betrothed. The girl's mother lay in the burial ground. She had committed suicide. The cause was a necrophiliac act which had been performed upon her daughter. A sister of our patient's bride had died. A necrophiliac, had been guilty of this enormity. He dug out the bodies of young girls, cut out their genitals and ate them.^* When the mother learned of the violation of her daughter, she took her own life. Thus the material of the dream leads us deeply into our sub- ject. We understand why he touches the girl from behind (mem- ory of the impaling of the peasant's wife). The seeing of the bodies symbolizes his necrophiliac impulses. We come to this repulsive theme of vampirism. Dr. A. Epaulard reports the case which he himself observed, the vampire of Muy (1. c). Case Number 48. It concerns Viktor Antoine Ardisson born in Muy (Var), 1872, who, after following his necrophiliac desires unobserved for perhaps nine years, was convicted in 1900 (or 1901) through the cadaver of a child found in his dwelling. The frightful odor of this cadaver had brought the attention of the neighbors to its presence. A. was an illegitimate child, his father unknown, his mother with a very bad inheritance. Violent and disorderly, she once struck the child heavily on the head with a stick ; according to the stepfather, the mental weakness of the son was perhaps due to this. This stepfather, a notorious thief and procurer, of very bad inheritance, was deserted after a few years by his wife, A.*s mother, and remained the only one to bring up the young Viktor. A. was presumably healthy; nothing can be determined as to convulsions and bedwetting. In school, which he often shirked, he passed as a limited, but not mischievous, pupil. We read concerning his sexual development that he felt no sexual impulse until puberty. He masturbated frequently, when he felt like it. 298 SADISM AND MASOCHISM In masturbation, he drank his semen, ''because it would be too bad to have it go to waste." He proposed marriage to the girls of the place, but was ridi- culed by them. It is not proved that he ever thereupon tried to rape a girl. As a substitute, he would follow the girls when they went to urinate, lick up their urine, and masturbate at the same time. He did not conceal his doings. "Why hide ?" said he. "Am I doing anything bad ?" Furthermore, he earned money in the town as a homosexual "fellator." He denies having committed acts of pederasty and sodomy and says also that he has never thought of them. He has moreover performed normal coitus. Still he does not remember the first coitus, and as for the consequences of the act of procreation, it is all the same to him. But he insists that he performed coitus with his mother when the stepfather was away. They always slept three in a bed, the mother between the father and son. Unfor- tunately, no dates are given. During his military service he had an afifair with a plump, well-built girl. This is very important, for we find that A. first sucked at the breasts of all the women whom he possessed, alive or dead, even of his stepfather's women. The first outbreak of vampirism arose also through the wish to see the breast of a girl, of whom he knew that her breasts were very beautifully formed. The procedure in his necrophiliac acts is as follows : If he knows there is a fresh female corpse in the cemetery, he reopens the grave, climbs into the grave, and uncovers the body. The age plays no part. All ages have been represented from a three-year-old child to a woman of sixty years. Then he sucks at his victim, performs cunnilingus. Sometimes, not regularly, he has coitus also with the body, but always only once (except in one case). He would have liked to take the bodies to his home, but he did that finally only with the head of a grown girl and with the corpse of a child of three and a half, which then was the cause of his betrayal. He is described otherwise as quiet and modest. Adapts himself to all circumstances by which he can Hve and endures also the mockery of others. He knows nothing of dependence, even upon the stepfather. In regard to the girl in Bonifacio, he remembers only the first name and the breasts. CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 299 The only anxiety he expresses in prison is : **They are not com- ing to cut off my tail?" The {rightfulness of his deeds does not appear to him. He knows nothing of pangs of conscience. Religious feeling indicated. He has a prayer book and a small angel of burnt clay, as well as a bit of grave ornament, which he brought from the burial ground. He was otherwise a regular worker. He drank little. He had no money for that. If the occasion offered, he would get drunk. In 1892, his stepfather took over the office of gravedigger in X., and soon Viktor A. took his place and held it until he entered the army. His food was as inferior and strange as could be. He lived on garlic, cucumbers, radishes, under some circumstances grass ; and for meat, rats and cats. Here, too, A.'s wretched poverty played a role. Their house had a bad name through the whole street because of its foul odor. They slept in straw in a garret stiff with dirt. So in 1893, he presented himself for military service. He would become there better in size, have regularly a full stomach and a good bed. He met with a great deal of chaffing in the army; the chief of his company soon considered him a dolt ! But he was no bad soldier. Only several times he went away without leave into the country surrounding the garrison (epileptic fugues?) and came back quietly when discovered. Just once he wound sack- cloth about his head and continued to repeat, in spite of all that was said to him, "I am not a soldier !" Finally he deserted, worked for a week at a timber yard, always in uniform, and was finally arrested in his home town. How did A. come to necrophilia? He was at that time twenty years old, for some time a grave- digger and without a sweetheart. He buried a girl with beautiful breasts. He dug her up again. Sucked on her body and wanted to carry her away, but she was too heavy. He had used in this way before he went into military service perhaps ten bodies in the graveyard. Whether he had sexual intercourse with dead bodies also in Bonifacio, the place of his garrison, is not known. He had at that time the affair with the girl with the large breasts. Captain T. states, however, that the cemetery there was easily accessible and that a young girl was buried there during A.'s sojourn, uncovered according to the custom of the country. 300 SADISM AND MASOCHISM After his return to N. without a mistress he disinterred and made use of a large number of corpses; but he cannot determine their number. He remembers only one because she had such beautiful breasts, and he had coitus with her several times in the same night, some- thing he did not otherwise do. He then gratified the desire to take the bodies home with him, once in part, the head of a pretty little girl of thirteen, whose entire body was too heavy for him, and once completely, by bring- ing the corpse of a girl of three and a half. A. had been enjoying this child corpse for more than a week. Decay had proceeded so far that rectum and vagina formed only a single opening ("cloaca"). The stench was so horrible after eight days that he no longer ventured to touch the body. He was probably awaiting the death of another girl that he might bring home her body. The father, however, who until then had attributed the stench to the filth (feces?) which the son had deposited in his garret room, found the cadaver as he was seeking for a wicker bottle. A.'s arrest followed. Physical examination gives normal results, interesting merely in this respect: the nail of the little finger on the left hand is very long (to brush the ashes from a cigarette, out of coquetry). The arms and particularly the hands show a constant trembling like a tremor senilis, which increases when observed or in the course of the day. At times scarcely noticeable, under certain circumstances it is sufficient to prevent his holding an object firmly. The tremor does not increase in a state of sexual excitement. The trembling in the legs is also very marked when the leg is stretched out unsupported. Very marked movement of the patella. Speech is slightly quivering, but otherwise correct and fluent. Genital organs normal, rather small ; the prepuce fairly long covers the glans without projecting beyond it. Erections are not frequent in prison; he seems quiet in this respect. Search is made in vain for signs of physical degeneration. There is on the other hand a general hypcesthesia; a very strong puncture must be made, especially at the trunk, to produce pain. His impulses and manifestations of will are no stronger ap- parently than in normal individuals, but the check is wanting, the CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 301 ability to decide what is good and what is evil. Memory easily fatigued. The author could not learn anything regarding certain absences on the part of A. Cunnilingus was his passion. He performed it on the living and dead. He made use of the wretched creatures who shared his stepfather's bed. He seems, however, to have cherished the super- stition that with this sort of caress one could wake the dead. He expressed his surprise that the dead did not respond. (Some one had told him that the dead can speak.) He was not bestially cruel to them like Bertrand, who was possessed by a fiendish im- pulse to destroy. The dead seemed to inspire in him a sort of physical admiration. He embraced them, gave them the tender name, "my little bride." He kept for a long time the head of the girl of thirteen that he had brought home, and which underwent a kind of mummification, kissed it and called it "my bride." It should be noted once more that his genitals were small. He revealed plainly a castration complex. His only fear in prison was of castration. Perhaps the cutting ofif of the head was a substitute for castration. The bad example of the stepfather had its effect, as Epaulard rightly stresses. He was a notorious thief and rogue. He associated, after his wife had left him because of his brutal conduct, with beggar women, whom he picked up on the street and who then shared his bed. The devouring of his own semen, a sort of autocannibalism, is a paraphiliac symptom which I have fairly frequently observed in hypochondriacs who are afraid of dissi- pating their life force. A., too, thinks "it is a pity to let so valu- able a material go to waste." This is a typical case of sexual infantilism in a slightly imbecile person. Signs of epilepsy, absences, hallucination, pavor noctur- nus, were not observed. He spoke vividly in his dreams. What he said, Epaulard has not told us. This might have given us a key to his nature. Epaulard comes to no certain conclusion in his writing as to the heredity, yet in the larger number of cases the parents seem to have been nervous or drinkers. The clinical histories of which he makes use are very incomplete ; nevertheless, nervous stigmata like epilepsy, debility, and imbecil- ity are repeatedly given. Epaulard points on page 20 to the possibility that necrophiliacs in orthodox regions take part at burials in the ceremony of the last kiss. Custom also prescribes at SADISM AND MASOCHISM such places that the body shall be beautifully dressed and borne to the grave uncovered. I will give some other characteristic examples from the litera- ture. SADISM ^\^IOLATION OF DEAD BODIES ALCOHOLISM The city magistrate Kulmbach, in Gross's Archiv (Vol. XVI, p. 289), reports a certain Alb. Beyerlin who used a dead woman for sexual intercourse, then slit open the abdomen, cut out the breasts and sexual parts of the corpse, and still carried them in his pocket the next day. The forty-three-year-old man had a troubled sexual past. He was known from his youth up to be forward toward women and exceedingly lecherous. He had been under various accusations for immorality. He gratified himself in later years after separation from his wife through onanism. He expressed to his acquaintances the idea "that he could disembowel the women," at which he would push up his coat sleeves and make corresponding movements. His wife was syphilitic and a prostitute of the lowest sort. He also admitted sodomy. He was a hard drinker of beer and carried out his instinctive ac- tions after alcoholic indulgence. The cutting up of the flesh afforded him the greatest voluptuous pleasure, while he cannot explain why he hid the pubic parts on his person. His behavior in the house of correction is exemplary, and al- though all his acquaintances are afraid of him they state that he is not a liar, nor is he vindictive or cruel, and he lived on good terms with his wife. CANNIBALISM Hans Gross reports in Gross's Archiv (Vol. XVI, p. 151) con- cerning the case of cannibalism described by Nemanitsch, Gross's Archiv (Vol. VII, p. 300 fif.). At that time a Fr. Bratuschka had confessed that he had strangled his twelve-year-old daughter, then with the aid of his wife had dismembered her and burned her in the stove. He roasted a portion and ate it. He was condemned on the ground of this confession, which was confirmed in several ways. It was proved three years later that a thief who had been arrested was the runaway daughter of Bratuschka. CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 303 The psychiatric investigation of Bratuschka revealed that he had imagined the murder and all the rest and obsessively insisted upon it. The wife under the influence of a priest, who declared her denial untrue, had confirmed all that her husband said. It is interesting from the report of Nemanitsch that Bratuschka would give way in anger to unmotivated abuse of his children. There were found with him descriptions of the life of savage tribes in which the passages which treated of the cannibalism of parents toward their children were especially marked, one with the note, *'missing Johanna Bratuschka." He stated moreover at that time that he had no superstitions and was religious, and declared that he had eaten the flesh merely from hunger. In Gross's Archiv (Vol. VIII, p. 327) A. Nemanitsch reports concerning the following case: A landholder, who is described as a good and virtuous man, was killed by his wife's deaf and dumb brother, especially at the in- stigation of his mother-in-law, and with the consent of his wife; the body was then boiled to a pulp and fed to the pigs. The mother-in-law seems to have been the active force. The cooking and hacking to pieces of the body seem to have been done by the mother-in-law and wife. NECROPHILIA SADISM CANNIBALISM Fritz Rheinisch informs us in Gross's Archiv (Vol. XV, p. 278) that a man, a laborer, first gratified himself sexually upon a corpse, then in a fury hacked the body in pieces, and took away with him the severed breasts and genital portions of the body, including the anus. Later he threw these parts away. He was in a continual state of excessive sexual excitement. He had previously had in- tercourse with a goat. The woman in question had stimulated him when she was alive without his ever having been able to have coitus with her. The example from Maupassant, concerning whom Dr. Fillet has published penetrating studies, proves that even persons in- tellectually of high repute may perform necrophiliac acts. "Maupassant gave the impression of a beautiful, large, and strong man, but appearance was very deceptive. The writer suf- fered frightfully and was very ill. One of his guests said cor- rectly: Tt always smelled of ether in Maupassant's house.' SADISM AND MASOCHISM Maupassant himself writes: *I have at moments such a horribly clear impression of the futility of things, of the unconscious abom- ination of creation, of the yawning void of the future, and of my existence, that a great and melancholy indifference overtakes me, and I should be glad to creep into a corner and lie there quietly hoping for nothing. I say to myself every evening, like St. An- thony, **One more day lost," and the days seem to me infinitely long and infinitely sad.' The actual cause of Maupassant's suffer- ing is well known. The great writer belonged to the category of epileptics." "We actually meet in Maupassant," thus writes Dr. Pillet who has given careful study to Maupassant's illness, **one of the char- acteristic symptoms of that disease, constant migraine. The members of his family as well as his servant attest the frequency and severity of his attacks of migraine. The writer himself says in his book Stir Veaii: 'The migraine which tortures me as no instrument of martyrdom could, which works havoc in my head, which makes me insane, which clouds my thoughts and scatters my memory like dust before the wind, this frightful migraine compels me to keep the ether bottle constantly at my nose. This fearful disorder will torture me for ten hours and more, and there is no remedy for it.' Maupassant was the victim of severe hereditary conditions. His father had led a dissolute life; the mother, an intelligent and cultured woman, suffered all her life with nervous attacks. The brother died just as Guy did of general paresis at the age of thirty-four. Guy de Maupassant suffered from severe nervous weakness even at the age of fifteen. He entered the army after leaving the lyceum and fought in the Franco-German war. He was officer in 1871 in the ministry of naval affairs. He left the ministry after the success of his famous story Bottle de Suif and plunged head over heels into work and pleasure. At thirty he is exhausted and 'through.' T feel so lost,' he writes to his mother, 'so lonesome and demoralized, that I beg you earnestly for a few tender Hues.' He took cocaine, ether, in- toxicated himself with hashish. In this way he appeared extremely brilliant and revealed nothing of the symptoms which characterize a person tormented with severe migraine, and yet he suffered frightfully. He was a victim of insomnia, of pains in the head and eyes, which did not however prevent him from producing his best works between 1880 and 1890. The eye disturbances that hindered him from working evenings increased gradually to pro- gressive paralysis of the ocular nerve. This makes his attacks of CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 305 melancholy and his strange cynicism only too intelligible. As to the errors into which he fell at the last, it is related that one day he had a piece of human flesh brought to him from a corpse that was being dissected and ate it raw. He was able thus from his own experience to affirm that human flesh was absolutely tasteless." I had occasion to observe a case of ''ideal vampirism." The case was analyzed by my experienced assistant Dr. Graven. The latter summarized his results in a brilliant report, which will follow: Case Number 49. Mrs. Z. was referred to me by Dr. Stekel for analytic treatment on account of "insane nervousness." Her nervous excitement had become continually worse during the past eight months, and at present she has not an hour of peace the whole day through. She sleeps badly, weeps often in the day- time, is depressed ; occasionally there are outbreaks of rage, in which she violently insults her husband and child. Her mind is, in her own words, "shut up in a deep, dark cave where nothing lives but slimy creeping things, where here and there a bluish light flickers and only the moans of animals break the gloomy silence." The patient's outer appearance corresponds to this picture so plas- tically given by her : snakelike, with reptilian eyes and such like movements. In other words, she actually resembles one's con- ception of a vampire. We will tread, in what follows, the den of a vampire ; we will search it and in the end deliver the soul im- prisoned there. The patient is a singer and dancer by profession, thirty years old, born in England of a Red Indian mother. The father was of mixed race, Portuguese-French. No inherited ills, no significant disease previously. The parents moved soon after her birth to a West Indian seaport. Her mother died when she was three years old. She remembers clearly that she had to be dragged forcibly from her mother's deathbed. This experience has remained her most vivid memory up to this day. She lost at that time the only love in her life. A grim hatred was kindled at this unhappy loss. This hate has become in later times a mighty flame directed to all persons. She spent the next twelve years with an aunt, whom she could not endure. She cherished constant death wishes toward this aunt ; the aunt was worth nothing in comparison with the idolized mother; she had only one advantage — she lived. The patient was 3o6 SADISM AND MASOCHISM trained for sadism in her aunt's house. Violent quarreling was the order of the day. An older boy cousin suffered epileptic seizures. Her own cruel nature soon manifested itself. A younger girl cousin was frequently ill-treated by her, often very seriously. She looked upon dolls as human creatures and tore them to pieces. Her favorite game was to take out their eyes and roll them around in her mouth. She felt particularly happy when she could watch the slaughtering of cattle. The sight of blood delighted her. To complete her education in sadism, she was frequently an interested spectator of the various brutalities practiced by the black laborers about the harbor. She came to Holland at the age of six, where she attended the public school. But she was a pitiful student, as she always felt so fearfully lonely without her mother, for whom she never ceased to yearn. A daily-recurring fantasy at this time was that she saw herself painted as a tall, dark woman, dressed in black, sitting upon a high rock at the seashore, her face buried in her hands, as if in profound thought or sorrow. Life was almost unendurable. She hated her relatives more and more and entertained plans for poisoning them. Her dark complexion became an obstacle to friendly intercourse with her schoolmates; they called her *'the negress." This intensified her hate and made her still more lonesome. After eight years of mis- ery her father put her into an English boarding school. This change made things no better, for there, too, she was avoided by her schoolmates. They called her "the Indian." This humiliation was intolerable to her, and she attempted suicide. She was taken to London, where she spent the next six years until her twenty- third year with her father. She hoped that she would be able now to live with her father in peace, for she had at last found a person who must feel affec- tion and liking for her. She was soon disillusioned. Her father was a ship's physician. The greater part of the year he was away on trips, and when he was in London he never laid aside his air of official dignity. He never gave her that fatherly affection which she so urgently craved. Very rarely he went with her to the theater or to a concert. She could not make acquaintances because of her dark color. So her life was fearfully monotonous: if she did not have to go to school, she remained alone in her room, infinitely alone in the great city of London. She often saw at night a white apparition, a woman passing through the room with a violin in her hand. This was her mother, who came to the CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 307 child as her only companion in these years of loneliness. Thus many a fantasy which later was of special significance was born of these endless hours. She admired her father beyond measure, although he never paid attention to her. We shall have more to say of this. She lived like this for three years and then sought consolation in the movement for women and later in Christian Science. But this did not interest her for long. She found another form of distraction, Lesbian love, and entered into a relationship with a dancer of her own age. Under this girl's influence the patient her- self became a dancer and singer. The homosexual affair lasted about a year. The patient shortly after learned to know a young man and became through him the mother of an illegitimate child. This brought about estrangement from her father. She had be- trayed his trust in her ; she had always sued for hi? love in vain, and now he thrust her in anger from him as dishonored. We can understand the patient's lament that she never learned to know what it was to feel happy. She always felt herself alone in the world, and no one cared for her after the death of her mother. The world was hostile and heartless and therefore she hated the world. She suffered under the presence of people and civilization ; she always wanted to go away and be alone. Hatred was, as she said, her only weapon against a despised worlds Vampirism de- veloped out of this all-embracing soil of hatred as the very flower of her hate Her father had never spoken to her since the occurrence that caused their separation. He died two years afterward, apparently of a "broken heart." The patient actually believes that her con- duct had its share in his death. Her strong bondage to her father comes plainly to light from the following dreams : Dream I : I was looking over the sea on a stormy night. A ship appeared. Just as it reached the coast, it turned westward and-* sailed away. I saw a man standing irresolutely on the stern. I thought it must be dangerous there ; nevertheless, I ran over the deck to reach the man. Yet there were so many obstacles that I proceeded but slowly. Many people were looking at us. Suddenly the man disappeared. I awoke in a depressed mood. Interpretation: The patient is struggling ceaselessly regarding one man, her father ; but it is in vain, for he is far away ; gone west, a symbolic expression for death. Dream II : I am walking in New York. I admire the enormous buildings. I have to give a great deal of money in all directions. 3o8 SADISM AND MASOCHISM I climb to the top of a very tall building — there seem to be many stairways in it. Finally I come to an elevator which has a door of iron bars. Then I see myself sitting in a room and putting on one of my father's socks, I believe on the left foot. It was very large and reached away above my knee. It was blue and red. Interpretation: This dream permits us to look through the iron-barred door into the secret chamber, the deepest corner of her psyche. The precious bond with her father lies concealed in this chamber. The stocking is a well-known sexual symbol. It does not fit ; it is drawn on the left foot — this signifies love to the father, which is morally not permitted. Yet her love to him is unalterably faithful, as appears from her associations to red ( =:love) and blue ( = loyalty). The father is her secret God, which is also clear from the following observation. Before she goes to bed, she often says the words "ancient father." This is a fragment of an inner prayer and a devout testimony to the su- preme position of the father in her heart. The following informa- tion further confirms this dream interpretation. She often speaks of likeness to her mother. She is able through identification with the mother to make it appear not a shameful thing if her father should have wanted to enter into intimate rela- tions with her. She misspoke herself once during the session and said "my father's child," when speaking of her own child. She meant to say "my child's father." She then admitted that she had often had the fantasy of having a child from her father's best friend (father imago). Her strong libidinal desires go out toward old men. To put the tongue into the anus afiPorded her the greatest satisfaction. This act is that of the greatest debasement con- ceivable and shows how measureless her love to her father is : she will do anything, even the most humiliating service, to prove her love. Many of the old men with whom she has gone and with *whom she has had sexual relations were over eighty, which meant a difference of about fifty-five years in age. She also noticed occasionally that she was particularly satisfied in homosexual acts if she gave herself up to the fantasy that she was the father and the other woman was herself. This fantasy created a relationship to the father, which she had so ardently desired in her girlhood. She went to Holland and after the birth of her child (in her aunt's house) she entered a ballet, where she appeared as dancer until her marriage, three years later. The conclusion of the mar- riage must be considered a belated obedience which she paid as tribute to her father's command. He had attempted to force a CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 309 marriage with her lover when she was pregnant with the illegiti- mate child. She refused. She married a man whose previous life was a matter of indifference to her. Her marriage was a wretched one. Her husband was himself a quite unusual parapathic, and his parapathy increased that of the patient. He also hated people and his attitude reacted upon her, so that her fearful hatred impulses were still more intensified. She was exceedingly jealous. She told me she had always been afraid that she might meet him on the street with another woman, for she would then not have been mistress of herself. She did once actually see him with a woman. She controlled herself until she reached home, but then she had a fearful outbreak of fury. She felt that she could murder her husband, "smash in his skull and tear out his brains.'* She was so excited that she had the feeling as if she were '^swallowing blood/' We come with this to her vampire nature, the craving to drink or suck blood, which are included in the word vampire. Her fantasies are ''bloodthirsty," and make "the blood curdle." They revel in cruelty and vengefulness toward a hated world. I will present here the various fantasies which have been brought to light from the depths of her mind. Her thoughts and waking dreams are occupied chiefly with the theme blood; she thinks and feels in sanguinary figures. She speaks of blood as the symbol of love, hate, anger, and passion. She meditates upon the difi^erence between animal and human blood and considers how blood looks if its color is removed, whether it is a watery fluid, and so on. A frequent question is how the body looks when all the blood is withdrawn. Does the body become pale and at the same time cold, does it become smaller? — and so on. If it rains, she imagines it is raining blood. The idea of blood streaming down in radiant sunshine produces in her a transport like an intoxication. She would like to suck and swallow blood but does not trust herself to do it, for she will not cause any one pain. She leaves it to the food testers. She cannot drink red wine on account of its close relation to blood, but she is passionately fond of blood oranges. Her thoughts busy themselves in playful fashion with an embryo in a preparation or the body of a small child. She has read of a woman who after an abortion kept the product in a glass vessel. She had the same thought at the time of her pregnancy. Now she has a sense of guilt because of her wish for an abortion, for to her an abortion is a murder. She believes that she does not love her 310 SADISM AND MASOCHISM seven-year-old son because he does not resemble her father. Her hate often rises to thought of murder. She wants then to kill her own son, not with a knife, but with her "bare hands," "wring his neck." She has the same criminal impulse toward her husband. She wants to murder him, strangle him, and keep his body with her in her room. She has had similar fantasies toward her relatives and some of her past lovers. It would have been a very valuable thing to her to have possessed the dead body of her father, but her mother's skull would have been the greatest pleasure of all. She has thought of various things to do to the corpses of her husband and former lovers : chew the raw flesh but not swallow it, in order — as she says — to get the taste of the blood. She would like to suck the juices from the body, shell out or tear out the eyes, roll them around in her mouth so that she could feel their roundness and softness. Then she would fill the sockets with blood. She asks herself what color the eyes have after death. She prefers sucking blood, which she might take from the hollow of the clavicle, to normal coitus. Coitus and death are close together for her. She believes that she would have to die if she reached the orgasm. For that reason during the act she lies as still as death and only wishes it to be over soon. The penis seems to her like a dagger and intercourse as if she were being pierced. She Hkes best to perform anilingus, particularly with old men. She is afraid of herself at fellatio, because she often during it feels the impulse to bite off the penis and testicles. She often has the idea of cutting off and burning up her husband's penis. Many times she loves her husband passionately: if he is submissive "like a child in her arms." But usually she wants to be badly treated before sexual intercourse, and then she falls into great sexual excitement. The following is a typical fantasy : She imagines one of her former lovers ; she squeezes, pinches, strikes his face with her fists until it is a pulp. Yet she inflicts no wound upon him. She throws him to the floor and strikes him and thrusts him violently with her feet. Finally she performs fellatio and anilingus. Then she desires him to tear the clothes from her body and beat her severely, throw her to the floor, fall upon her with overwhelming force, and finally accomplish cunnilingus. She says that only so could a man satisfy her. For this reason she inclines toward Lesbian love. But then she suffers from fearful sadistic impulses. She is not content to manipulate the female organs, introduce her "hand up to the wrist" into the CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 311 vagina, but these ''harmless" things are associated with the most frightful fantasies. Many a time she has had to stop suddenly because she was afraid of being overpowered by her impulses. She asks herself anxiously what she might do if a young girl came into her power docile and willing to submit. She says literally: **I should like most of all to kiss her breasts . . . and then tear them or bite them off . . . and then eat them. I would tear out the vagina, the uterus . . . and the rectum. I would eat all of them and with them the inner portions of the thigh which border on the sexual parts. I would then tear her open and "fondle" the viscera — take them out and put them back. I should like to feel their warmth. Finally I should want to suck the blood from the side of her neck." The patient has often had the thought of killing a girl and doing all this to her — but the manner of death she has never clearly considered. She has repeatedly grown faint during intercourse with a young girl at the idea : *'Tear out everything — rend it to bits!" She often has the fantasy : "I should like to get into the uterus or the rectum — lie there a while and then break further into the abdominal cavity, where I could tread upon the viscera with my feet. I would at last find my way to the heart and there drink the hearths blood — pluck out the heart and perhaps eat it up. I should like to press into a man directly behind his testicles. I want to rage about in his body until I come to the breast and there, too, drink the fresh blood from his heart." All these bloodthirsty fantasies were contained in the following daydreams in apparently innocent form. The analysis was able to bring the concealed stream of sadism to the surface. These daydreams are characteristic : 1. I have a house full of young girls; they have all been well brought up and are very beautiful. 2. I am seeking out lovely young girls for the white slave trade. I bring them to my home and treat them very well. I have a kind of harem. Behind these fantasies lies the sadistic monster, vampirism. She looks upon these girls as her victims, every day another one. Every morning she seeks out one and rends her in pieces. . . . These fantasies had their origin in the London period when she had her first homosexual afifair. She sees herself in her fantasies as an extraordinarily beautiful woman surrounded by many lovers. She yields to each lover for a certain period, then she kills him. _ No trace of him is left. She 312 SADISM AND MASOCHISM has destroyed twenty of them thus. One of her fantasies is this : There come as suitors a young and an old man. She entices the young man (her child's father) to murder the old man (her father). Later she slays the young man and lives in solitude forever in a beautiful palace. The patient's mood has improved toward the end of the analysis ; her hate fantasies have diminished. She dreams of a young man who brings with him an aged physician (father imago), because she is very ill. The doctor falls desperately in love with her while he is treating her. After her recovery they marry and live very happily. The patient is now convinced that only an old man can make her happy. She fears sexual intercourse lest she should become preg- nant. That would be the revival of the painful experience which was fatal to her father: the birth of her illegitimate child. She will not go any more to women : homosexual love no longer affords her satisfaction. After all the machinations of the demon that dwelt in her soul as in a den had been discovered, she could see that an inex- tinguishable hatred like a dragon had been devouring all her capacity for life and shedding misery and despair about it. She reflected. Her fantasies had driven her into madness. A short time afterward she left her parapathic husband and has been able since to maintain herself and child through suitable occupation. She is reconciled to life and awaits happiness, if she learns to know an agreeable older man. The monster, the vampire in her, has been tamed and rendered harmless. Here endeth our encounter with the soul of a vampire. I should like to add a fev^ details to this excellent account by my pupil. I analyzed her husband some time before I made the acquaintance of the vampire. He was an unusually talented, interesting man, who had already passed through an analysis by a Holland colleague. His most prominent symptom was an unconquerable longing for new erotic adventures. It was a satyriasis such as I have hardly ever seen again. Even in the morning he was dominated by the thought: ''Whom will you win to-day?" He accosted daily many girls and women, had various rendezvous, which he had to hide from his jealous wife. Despite a gifted nature, he had achieved nothing in life. Like many existences which have lost their way, he seemed to want CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 313 to devote himself to analysis. He kept this plan a secret from me, but it was easy to discover. He came to me to get some idea of my method. I broke off the treatment because I recog- nized at once that he was thoroughly dishonest. He came with a bouquet of interesting associations, dreams, and complicated problems and knew how to conceal the most important things. I learned from his wife without his knowledge the most fright- ful things of his private life. He had seduced her son, per- formed fellatio with him, and wanted to tempt him also to coitus with his mother. He lived in Vienna in a menage a trois [arrangement of three]. His best friend must be also his wife's lover. He compelled her to perform coitus with the friend before his eyes. Later a colleague in Holland informed me that he was in bad repute at home. He had taken advantage of his wife's prostitution and reaped profit (chantage) from her affairs. I do not know if this charge is justified. The wife had admitted the relation with old men; of the extortions she ostensibly knew nothing. I saw at once that the ''vampire" was the better character. I learned that the worthy couple were always quarreling, and beating and brawling were the order of the day. The wife was advised to separate from her husband, who had made use of her materially. She was a married woman only for the sake of appearance. She was grateful to her husband for having given her child an ''honorable name" ( !) . Solely on this ground had she borne with the count- less humiliations and the torment of her marriage. It may be mentioned as a matter of curiosity that this man later wrote a comprehensive book on the education of children and has also delivered a good many lectures upon this theme that lies so near his heart. It seems as if the first analysis had destroyed all his inhibitions and mobilized the monsters within him. Now he wants to occupy himself as an analyst ( !) . The vampire saved herself from this marriage by a "homo- sexual marriage" with an older girl, who was at the same time enormously sadistic and especially necrophiliac in disposition. To see corpses, watch by them, visit graveyards, meant for this girl a peculiarly refined sort of gratification. Mrs. Z. deflowered this girl with rude force, dug about in her vagina with her fists, and caused her partner the most horrible pain. The two 314 SADISM AND MASOCHISM would not leave each other. It remained for Dr. Graven to bring about the twofold liberation: on the one side from the husband, with whom she had continued to maintain relations; and on the other from the friend. One can understand her sadism if one remembers that the wild blood of savages runs in her veins. She had at the same time to suffer all her life under the absurd hatred and scorn with which the white people in the colonies (and at home) look upon half-castes. Her whole pride revolted against this sepa- ration of men into two groups, one of which was placed on a level with the beasts. Vengeance upon the white race — that was her secret guiding motive. To drink the blood of the hated whites, was her secret craving. At the same time she would have been happy to have been white. She left Holland and England and came to Austria, because here we do not have these prejudices and do not comprehend them. A human being is to us a human being, be he white, black, or yellow. Thus her vampirism arose from her family history and her social situation. Instead of adapting herself to the civilization of the white race, she fled in defiance to the savagery of her mother's ancestors. She loves but one man — her father. It was her sorrow that he did not love her and after her misstep drove her like a dog from the house. To her honor be it said that she permitted her child to have an exceptionally good education. I was interested in the child and wanted to discover what were the consequences of the husband's seductive arts upon the boy. J found an extraordi- narily attractive and lively child, who adapted himself exceed- ingly well to the great city and externally gave no signs of the beginning of a parapathy. Probably the effects of the trau- matic occurrences will appear later. The analysis by my American colleague had a lasting good result. The vampire works industriously and supports herself and child. She has now taken refuge in an ideal love and is constructing for herself a new world. It is very characteristic that paraphiliacs mutually attract each other. I am in possession of some notes concerning the husband of Mrs. Z. I knew at once that he had a pronounced homosexuality. He debased all women and liked to identify CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 315 himself with the girls he had won and, immediately after secur- ing them, degraded. He writes concerning his fantasies with onanism : The fantasy with onanism hitherto perceived merely as a col- lective idea with inextricable affect value has finally allowed itself to be discovered. At the beginning I try for the most part to imagine myself with a woman, which only imperfectly succeeds. The idea loses either its clearness or its stimulus. Any number of feminine beauties are "tested". . . in vain : the feeling of the blissful height- ening of the life functions, of being swept away together in an ever-rising flood, is wanting ... to say nothing of the fact that the "cataract" does not come. After I have sought unsuccess- fully to conjure up before me some beautiful shape, I attempt it in a piquant situation. I am for example in a large hotel and want to take a bath, and through some mistake get into a bath- room on the wrong side; I undress, go behind the screen, and stand face to face with a nude woman ; I stammer something un- intelligible . . . she smiles and says : "We may use this situation in one of two ways; either you are a gentleman and I am a lady; we know what is proper for us and will adhere to it, know, in which case we have nothing to fear and must only see to it that no one else shall discover our situation ; or we are beasts lying in wait for an 'occasion' but then it would be childish to permit such an awkward situation as this to be seized upon by our im- patience; we had better therefore appoint a rendezvous. . , I understand that I am lost, for to remain means, "to neglect to take advantage of a situation for which I have longed my whole life"; and a rendezvous signifies, "to acknowledge the standard of a common swine," while an attempt at persuasion in the sense of "just this situation," and so on, would seem like a stupid over- estimation of something looked upon by her as a matter of course, I try other situations, in which the unpermitted always forms the chief fact, drags along, while off and on I have to think of my wife, of another in my place. He has a large thick penis, and I imagine that a delicate, serious woman sees this penis and is roused against her will. Something swells underneath, becomes moist. She feels, she knows, that this man not only does not love her but is wholly incapable of a tender feeling and yet — or perhaps, for this reason — she is at the mercy of an irresistible impulse to submit to this brutal penis. A glance suffices ; they both know what must 3i6 SADISM AND MASOCHISM happen. He knows that she belongs to him. He does not look upon the inner struggle, or, better, the setting aside of every re- sistance, otherwise so strong, which is accomplished in a moment through the force of magic, as a powerful and terrifying tragedy . . . he feels, his sensations are, only in the genitals. His eyes stare at her, vacantly, obsessed, reflexive; they open, the pupils enlarge . . . this organically determined process has with her the force of a command; she arises; the way in which she looks at him is almost a beckoning; he follows her. ... As a matter of course she takes him into her room. They disrobe ; she keeps on her shoes and stockings, and thus he knows that he shall not possess her as his wife, not as his friend, not in trust and confi- dence; the traces of her having come thus from the streets will cling to her ; the strange, the unknown, will be in the foreground. It will be clearly impressed upon them : "No love leads us ; not like married people are we; we will not be 'mother and father' . . . but sexual beings and nothing else.'* When the stiff, hard penis swollen to complete insensibility enters her body, everything in her pelvis becomes soft, turgescent, wet . . . and at this moment the miracle happens : the two beasts filled with hate and inspired by instinct become loving individuals, a pair of lovers, their souls experiencing infinity in a mutual physical event; life — for the first time it may be — being felt as a gift of immeasurable value from that unfathomable cause, the nature of which has been threatened, through ordinary familiarity with the forces dwelling within them and surrounding them, with becoming something intolerably strange. In the surging and quivering of their flesh, in the strong- hold of the mucous membranes, they find their souls, find each other; it is as if the soft, engorged masses say to each other in their nestling and embracing: "We love each other; we are the souls; we are the life, the beginning of fife and its final purpose; where we love, everything else must obey." Then all at once it darts through me: "That which becomes from life's warm inspira- tion, the sober ebb and flow of custom, is sin ; marriage is there- fore in its nature impure, the married man a ridiculous, unclean beggar who receives every day his 'portion' for the maintenance of his banal existence." Where the physical forms announce to the eye : "We have the power to create a new bliss, a new exalted sense of life, a new stream from our warm blood," there habitual love becomes a pale specter; and "man" in the true sense is the only one who is able to understand the language of life's impera- tive, intelligible through immediate sensation. CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 317 The following passage in his notes is characteristic : "It is exceedingly difficult for me to conceive that a woman can be true to a man. I feel woman's seriousness as a hypocritical pose or as an accursed stupidity. My mother told me that she had remained faithful to my father, although he had granted her her freedom and a handsome blond officer had made it not easy for her. I was forced to consider it a pity for the man concerned and for herself that they had not obeyed their instincts. I hate my mother for her false sanctity." We see he assumes a prostitute in his mother. He speaks quite shamelessly of the possibility of incest. He has no inhibitions. He openly betrays his sadism, which thus far he had anxiously concealed. "I was thinking this morning that I am always repeating the same old story with every woman, which ends with her degrada- tion. Many times the debasement does not take place until after coitus, but often it precedes this. I recall here the young woman in X., with whom I did not really have an affair, but with whom I carried on an innocent love play. All at once I did not permit her to hear anything more from me, which made her very angry. This memory has been a starting point of one of my masturbatory fantasies, in which the 'resistance' has been the chief stimulus for me. (I have coitus with her while I hold her pulse at the wrist.) A murder fantasy plays a part in this. Then suddenly another fantasy flashes through my thought; I am impregnating the young woman ... it is a matter therefore of fructification. (My spermatozoa battle in the uterus with the ova of the woman, overpower them; the woman becomes pregnant with millions of children: she bursts!!) Great joy! Also the thought that the semen brings about a sort of inflaimnation in the mouth of the womb gives me pleasure. The violence seems to me the chief thing; I should like forcibly to impregnate my wife." The sadistic fantasy with this parapathic is shoved upon the spermatozoa. But we see the same impulse to press in which his wife has manifested. The rupture of the woman by means of a million fertilized ova is at any rate something new in the sphere of onanistic fantasies. It is evident that a sadistic atmosphere was cultivated in this marriage. The fact that both parties were homosexual led to a peculiar inversion. He played with his wife the woman who 3i8 SADISM AND MASOCHISM has Intercourse with a woman, and she the man who has inter- course with a man. This circumstance bound the partners to each other. It required great analytic art to dissolve this bond. One will comprehend that in a disposition such as our female vampire revealed the favorable opportunity can mobilize the latent impulses. There are many individuals among the canni- bals and necrophiliacs whose occupation is connected with dead bodies. It is naturally very probable that their tendency has been the decisive factor in the choice of profession. The twenty-three cases of sexual gratification upon dead bodies cited by ''Epaulard," Lyons, 1901, belong to the fol- lowing occupational classes : I II III IV Remarks I. Body washers coi. II. Mendicant friar coi. III. Priest coi. IV. Nobleman coi. V. Imbecile, 27 yrs. coi. VI. Medical student coi. VII. Nobleman coi. Distinguished man, family of six chil- dren. VIIL Gravedigger coi. IX. Medical student coi. X. Gravedigger coi. The "vampire of Muy." XL Journeyman. 23 years m. coi. XIL Assistant in anatomy m. coi. XIII. Tramp m. coi. XIV. Sergeant coi. sad. Sergeant Bertrand XV. Marshal of France coi. sad. cann. Gilles des Ray. He was pedophiliac ; the necrophiliac ac- tivity was preceded by sadistic acts upon living chil- dren. XVI. Scribe sad. CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 319 XVII. Gardener XVIII. ? m. coi. sad. m. coi. sad. m. sad. XIX. Jack the Ripper XX. Chemineau, Tramp m. coi. sad. coi. m. sad. XXL ? XXII. Vinedresser. 24 yrs. XXIII. Imbecile coi. m. sad. m. sad. cann. cann. cann. The acts are noted in the order in which they were carried out in the typical cases. coi. = Intercourse was performed, m. = The victim was murdered, sad. = The victim was mutilated, cann. = Portions of the body were eaten or the blood drunk. We are not astonished to find among the twenty-three cases two students of medicine, one assistant in anatomy, and two grave- diggers, and further one washer of bodies. Yet anatomy seems to represent the noblest sublimation of this atavistic instinct. The case of 1. P. L. Hulst may yet be mentioned in regard to the theme of choice of occupation and paraphilia ("Beitrag zur Kenntnis der Nekrophilie und des Nekrosadismus," Archiv f. Kriminal., Vol. 37) : It concerns a man E., appointed assistant gravedigger, who by his own admission had disinterred twenty bodies of children. The female bodies he violated, while of the male he cut off the genitals, which he threw away. The Swiss psychiatrists Caspari and Swaep found : Slight imbecility, infantil- ism, intelligence of an eleven-year-old boy, epileptic seizures. It is interesting that in his nineteenth year E. had experienced a great disappointment in love. He felt himself repulsed by women, had no luck, and said he had cohabited once or twice normally. On- anism since childhood, in which often a "spirit" appeared to him. This spirit or the devil had instilled the necrophiliac impulse into him, against which he had struggled in vain. He gives as the second motive for the necrophilia the fact that girls always re- pulsed his attempts to approach them. This had driven him di- rectly into the necrophilia. His father was violent-tempered, reviled and cursed at home ; sometimes there were blows for all. Then his father would lock himself in a stall with a goat. He masturbated either before or after touching the corpse, but does not seem to have had erections. SADISM AND MASOCHISM Castration of the boys' bodies shows clearly that he had directed his original impulse against his father, whom he wanted to castrate and from whom he feared castration. We find the remnants of sadism and necrophilia not merely in the brutal acts of desecration and tearing asunder of dead bodies, not merely in the severe symptoms of parapathias, but also in the small actions of every day and in trivial practices. Dr. Missriegler is at present working upon the preparation of a vast amount of material of unusual interest, a Journal of a Quite Ordinary Person, as the author calls it. This extraordi- narily valuable human document has been written by a well- known poet but has been regarded as strictly private, absolutely not designed for publication. This highly talented person underwent an analysis from interest in psychology, although he is in no wise abnormal. He is married, lives happily in his marriage, from which he has two children, is able to work, is satisfied with his success, and has at the most one single symptom which one might regard as parapathic: he likes to veil himself in clouds of tobacco smoke. Out of gratitude for the analysis, which penetrated to the very deepest repressed complexes, he placed the journal at the disposal of my col- league, Missriegler, and will permit him to publish those por- tions which appear of value psychologically. I may introduce here a small part of this, which refers to necrophilia and sadism, as my colleague has presented it (Case 50) : The diary begins at twelve years. But in the sixteenth year he wrote an introduction which is worthy of note, and the form and the occasion of which he cannot explain. He believes that Heine so fascinated him at the time that he wanted to write a memoir in his style. It reads : It will not be an easy thing for me to do, dearest one, far from it. But yet I will tell thee : thou hast pleaded with me so tenderly, so sweetly tortured me with thy lovely eyes, thy dead eyes. And it has been so long since I have been able to gratify a wish of thine ; thou hast been so long from me, oh, so long ! God knows, I was terrified when this morning thou stoodest so suddenly at my bed. The winter morning sun lighted my small room so mystically, I thought, and it was thine eyes which rested upon my brow, thy dear CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 321 dead eyes. Didst thou read in the hateful lines in my brow how I have suffered and how I have changed? Thou hast remained as beautiful as in that time; I knew thee at once; thine arms are fair, they are soft as once they were ; thy hands are tender as years ago, only they are transparent and blue ; and thy lips have become white. As I held the death watch at thy bier, they could not grow pale, but now I scarcely know them more. Ah, yes, two tiny dimples remain, as if from my teeth ; dost thou still know . . . ? I have changed more, dost thou not find it so? Ah, God, the time is so long since then. Rememberest thou not how long? It may be two years or twenty or two thousand. I know not. I have lost all sense of time since thou art dead. They buried all in the coffin with thee. Everything, but not my love. I love thee still to-day, and thou? Lovest thou me still? Can the dead love? Not this enigmatic smile, Mary ! No ; I want no answer, I know it : thou standest there at my bed and yet art dead ! We shall love again and yet again as we loved when we were children; it was so beautiful! Ah, as a child I was always happy. Happiest when my grandmother told me the old tales, such droll tales, such killingly comical tales. I leaned upon her knee and looked up at her with attentive eyes ; and then she told again, only as much longer, what happened further to the prince after he had taken the beautiful princess for his bride, and how their son then . . . Alas, I have forgotten all the silvery-toned, sparkling tales ; but not the sad stories of the wicked giant nor her who told them. But she, too, is dead. She died in the new era in which she stood out from the century which was passing away, at the end of which I was born. The rosy dawn of the new threw its radiance upon my cradle, but the old caressed me and rocked me in my sleep until it laid itself to sleep. And it will never rise again. The new century, however, mine, arose in jubilant strength, and its golden sun rent the dark romantic veil of mist in tatters and touched these with red. And as it parted the curtain asunder, it saw first how much there still was for it to do ; there lay the snow, oh, how high ! There was still snow then in 1890. I have never seen so much snow since. Of course, not that of 1890, but at least I did live through that. I first saw the light on the second of January, and not until late in the spring did the ghetto wall stand forth from the silver, perhaps also the dirty, sea. Indeed, the ghetto wall was the first thing which I saw of the great world, for our dwelling stood on the Judengasse, one side of which is formed by the ancient high gray wall. Do not laugh, my dear SADISM AND MASOCHISM one, if I tell you that probably my preference for Jews arises from this source; thou wantest to know all that my memory re- tains of my childhood. I knew no other reason, at most only that they are more clever than we Christians, and I always liked clever people; I also like the Jews. Of course they must not be dirty. I never liked dirt, and I believe even as a little baby I cried when I was dirty. Whether I already showed this commendable horror in my earliest years, I am not quite sure : the documents have been lost. My brothers and sisters have also used or misused quite the same documents for their notes, and so it would be difficult to read from these palimpsests the older text (furthermore, my parents have always been skeptical toward my exercises in writing). Beside all this, I had several brothers and sisters : my parents made it a sacred number. Perhaps because the number three is more suitable to the devout Christian than the Old Testament seven, four of us had to die ; I was not one of them. They were, alas, all my sisters. The one older than I, I loved most deeply. Oh, God, I did love her. She died of an accident in her tenth year. She would run so spiritually transparent with light steps to my cradle and bend her little angel face caressingly over me, so that I could see the little blue veins in her temples. I believe that I knew even then that she would die and for that reason wept the more bitterly when she went from me. She looked like thee, Mary, only more delicate, more ethereal, her little face framed in her thick hair. Yes, I know certainly that is the way she looked ; I am sure of it, although I was still so small at that time, and a photograph from those years shows her otherwise. (I secretly stole this picture, the only one of her in ex- istence, and I only know where it is concealed.) I love such ten- der faces as I love thine, Mary, and thus I still see her before me. She taught me to speak and I often talk with her now, for she is the only one who understands me. And I tell her what I have in my heart and what I want to do, and I follow what she says to me as I followed when she silently nodded as I told her of thy first sweet smile. I see her countenance illumined with love, the lips absorbed in mysterious dreams; I feel that she floats near me silently; I hear her if I am in the suitable mood of devotion. Yes, Mary, I love her: I love her as one can love only the dead, who have no bodies to bind the soul ; I love her with my undying divine soul, more profoundly, more divinely than men love ; I love her as I love thee. CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 323 Is it not astonishing that the man who speaks here so une- quivocally of his boundless love to the dead sister, who so poetically represents the identification of *'Mary'* with his sis- ter, apparently never in his life thinks of this sister? In fact, he, who has command of a quite extraordinary recollection of the experiences of his earliest childhood and was aware without analysis of events from his third or fouth year, is unable to recall one thing, his sister's death and burial. He at first did not even know how old he might have been at the time (five years). It may be that this memoir is actually only the play of fantasy and an imitation of Heine. He affirms that he wrote it at the time in the enthusiasm of his first unrequited love for his cousin. Let us see. A profound sadism came to light now in the course of the analysis and the further study of his diary. He is in his life a kindly, friendly man who never does harm to any one ; on the contrary, he often helps beyond his means. But his writings speak another language. Naturally for reasons of discretion I cannot refer to the published works, but strange to say he has never published particularly valuable artistic productions. He has all kinds of rationalizations for this. They lie dormant in his journals. I will briefly cite from them here. First a poem which glorifies his sadomasochism in general. At twenty he wrote the following: ODE TO PAIN Holy pain ! — To thee, all-subduing, warning, saving messenger of death — I bow my knee : — to thee, my divinity ! — Thou sealest with thy glowing seal my brow — consecratest me with flaming kiss to be thy priest. Lord of life! — As thou standest at the entrance to being, so standest thou gravely at its end. — If thou hast shown life to the child — in its broken toy — to the youth in the torment of his love — thou dost also bring it to pass — ^that the old man gladly departs — even loves the death — which thou dost announce. All merciful divinity! — To thee I owe my life — thou who didst raise me to the light from my mother's womb — To thee I owe 324 SADISM AND MASOCHISM ail — the firm defiance — the iron will — which the blows that thou dealest me ever renew — the ripeness of thought — like the laughter that sets one free : — I thank thee for mine own ego. The others flee thee — and then some time they moan beneath thy hand — which swings us who are thine — like scourges before thee. — We must scourge them — thou rewardest us for this with supreme delight, thy richest gift — with thyself ! — We bear like priests — thy godhead in our hearts. In frenzied rapture — the breast glows, burns, flames, the tears are dried, till suddenly — the covering bursts — and high breaks forth — a laughter shrill. — And who loves not to laugh ? And we, thy priests, know — only tears of joy — only laughter, laughter — of the rapture of pain. Therefore I love thee, therefore am I thine, almighty dispenser — and scourge the others — and myself. He has published more than one poem concerning pain, which I might introduce here in further proof. But we obtain the first more detailed reference to the content of his unconscious sadistic fantasies from a novel, also unpublished, which he wrote when he was eighteen. He was at that time really no longer in love with his cousin, although he had not yet entirely freed himself from her, but she plays the leading role in the story. The homosexual component has likewise found very clear expression in it. Two friends, physicians, love a girl, who is the cousin of one of them. But he gives her up, for she stood in the way of his ambitious plans, and leaves her to his friend, although he knows that she loves him and he also loves her. He talks himself into loving an influential girl of means, marries her, and becomes a famous operating surgeon. The cousin marries the friend. But not all his success, not all his work, can stifle his feeling; he seeks her again, and now the following scene takes place. He has been trying in vain to draw from her a confession of the love which has continued to live in her. Then he receives a telegram that his wife, whom he had left at home sick, is in danger of her life. I can best reproduce the extract : "Come in here, Anton," said Anna, who had picked up the tele- gram, softly but earnestly, pointing to a door. "May I read it?" CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 325 He nodded. ''Your wife's condition is much worse, operation likely. Come immediately. Professor Canter." They were alone, and he looked dumbly into her eyes. She understood his question and said nothing. But as he was about to hasten to her, she cried out as if she would drive from her a fearful thought: "No, no! she will not die, no! And even so, my hus- band lives. Holy Virgin, help me !" She had quickly hidden her face in her hands. Slowly he drew her hands from her eyes and asked softly, almost hoarsely : ''Was that the desired answer? You still love me?" "Go!" said she and stepped backward. His hand made a movement as if he would press her to his heart, and a sharp glitter flashed in his eye. She remained inexorable. The bitter hateful feeling again arose in him as at the time when he had waited in vain for her. It constricted his throat, and he swallowed something loathsome, which tasted like blood. Then he turned without a word to go out. Once more he turned at the door. She stood there in the room at her full height, a soft trans- figuring light of joy at the victory won suffusing her countenance and mingling strangely with the pain in her features. The light fell through the window full upon her figure, the sun's rays brightly caressed her shining hair and seemed to linger in slow ripples upon it, but in her eyes glistened two precious pearls through the veil of her lashes. It was a picture to restore youth to one grown old. He rushed toward her with a cry, embraced her, kissed her wherever he could, on her brow, cheeks, lips, though she did not move; the more she resisted, the more violently he pressed her to himself and closed her mouth with his maddened kisses. It was as if blood were before his eyes, while he only panted again and again half-sufifocated : "You do still love me, still love me, still love me?" He did not see that her face was torn with grief, that she was unable to answer him ; he was sensible only of her despairing resistance and stifled every sound upon her lips ; half beside himself he pressed her heaving, convulsive breast to himself. Her striving became ever weaker; once more she sum- moned all her strength and then hung powerless with eyes closed in his arms. His paroxysm had now subsided ; he swayed and had to support himself upon the edge of the table. Anna fell upon the carpet at his feet. With panting breast and wide-open eyes he stared at the beau- tiful woman, who lay as one dead before him ; pale as a corpse 326 SADISM AND MASOCHISM was her face. One spot only upon her forehead was blood-red, there where he had kissed her : a brand upon her. . . . I have found this fantasy of a lust murder a number of times in analyses, but our poet completely rejected it until we came upon it again in a dream. It is interesting to pursue the parallel passages from this scene and the small fragment from the autobiography. The dead woman bears the sign of the kiss. We find the same stigma in a further work of the man, which reveals the deepest layer of his sadism. It has its place in the same setting as in the novel, in the life of a physician. It has always been his great desire to become a surgeon ; external cir- cumstances have compelled him to take up another profession and achieve success as a writer. The poem, which also is out- standing as a work of art, is this : WIEDERSEHEN Two attendants brought a corpse a fresh one, in coarse gray linen bound, By its string swung a ticket bearing the number seven hundred fifteen. "Doctor," said one, in business tone, ''legal case, autopsy, poisoning," and slid the dead upon the oaken table ; the head close-wrapped fell back with a thud. "Ah, well," I said, "at seven my report." I stood alone, in clean white gown, throughout the room a faint, fine smell of blood ; :he glittering knives and scissors seemed to smile. I loosed the coverings from the face — and started back. A face familiar once. — Who was she? I leaned half dreaming at the table's edge, bending above her ; I looked, perplexed, and stared into the half-closed eyes of gray. The arm across the withered bosom stretched. — Students are singing : vita nostra brevis. A lovely child accompanies them at the piano, blond tresses, eyes of gray. She laughs and jokes and plays and sings and kisses. CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 327 Then arm in arm I walk with her beneath the trees ; she laughs and jokes and kisses, mad with joy. — Was that a dream? The darkness of the evening Crowding upon the walls draws them together: I scarcely see the dead ; but from the window a feeble ray of pale and trembling light falls on the face now white and faded. Faded? O God, O God, once fair as May, once warm when I — and all at once I press my burning mouth upon her lips and kiss them, kiss them, kiss them as in frenzy ; and all the sweetest names I know I cry cajoling, sobbing, pleading, in her ear. The right one ? Ah, perhaps ! And she must bear me ! Upon her lips two dimples glow, formed in the past ? Formed now ? But surely formed by me, by me ! And — why — did we — ^then — have to part ? While I alone pursue the way of thorns : the people call it the life of a physician known to fame ? — And what has been the path for her ? Yes, she has withered ; I feel it on her bosom. — So we must meet again and here? Here, where I as doctor cut her flesh apart, the body which was mine ! A frenzy of desire runs through my veins, once more, once more. . . . In horror I draw back : a desecrator of the dead ? Wide is her eye with its own staring gaze. — They found me raving in the morning on the floor. This unveiled necrophiliac fantasy, despite its secondary artistic elaboration, does not deny the connection with the primary original fantasy as the memoir gives it: the meeting again with the dead sister, upon whose mouth are visible the traces of the teeth from his kiss. The situation is still more clearly depicted in small details in poems which, however, have been published and cannot therefore be used. Impressions of moods among graves echo in marvelous manner. One of the unpublished ones, artistically weaker, to be sure, brings also the relations between his necrophilia and his smoking. 328 SADISM AND MASOCHISM Brooding I walked between the rows of graves; One single bit of candle sputtered still to consecrate the silent passing of the dead ; it wreathed its smoke about the ascending soul like incense far into the cold and chilling sky of night. — Its flame was gone. — Feebly crept the last faint ring of smoke into the mist. Almost against my will I thought upon the dead, and so on. I might bring confirmation from many passages, as from the analysis itself, that smoking is to him a worship of the dead. Since we naturally took this one symptom especially into con- sideration, we were able to demonstrate the wonderful con- densation in it. The most varied impulses abreact there, those of ambition, religion, desire for revenge, homosexuality, and so on. But the most interesting for the theme which lies before us is the hidden vampirism, which finds expression in the asso- ciations : ''drinking smoke — drinking blood — sucking." I will not conclude these brief examples without referring to the following details. He fell in love with his wife, his first warm love, on a November first, the feast of the dead. His diary contains on this day a reckoning up of his earlier life, a survey of his various life experiences, and he closes with the following words : . . . That love, actually upright and warm, had still for the most part a likeness to my present mood, but the reserve of that period was conditioned through infantile shyness ; while now, so long as I am together with her, I feel nothing of my usual sense of superiority, of my sadistic pleasure in play, nothing of all that: only an unbounded intimate warmth of affection. It is, as if the hands for me. . . , In the damp and cold November night 6 on the day of the dead, our love awakes. The love of the dead. A love pure and discarnate, burning with the soul's clear flame. Even in our rare kiss our souls flow together. CANNIBALISM AND NECROPHILISM 329 I do not know why I write these verses here ; they are so wholly inartistic, almost senseless, but there must be something in them of which I am not aware. I cannot alter anything in them, cannot improve them. We may compare with this what is stated in the memoir. And now it is interesting that the period of engagement was prolonged a fairly long time, influenced, to be sure, by external circumstances. But all at once his affianced bride became very ill, and although from the medical side the danger of inter- course for his wife was brought home to him, although noth- ing had changed in the external circumstances, they mar- ried. . . . He married his dying sister. Yet the marriage again so far freed him from the sister fixation that his love survived his wife's recovery. How closely the psychology of this person brushes upon that of all the other cases which this book contains, and yet what a chasm separates this gifted, healthy man, performing a noble function, from the criminals and sick people of our series. He knew how to sublimate his sadism ; he either would have been a great surgeon, as always was his dream, or he could satisfy his primitive instincts in artistic works. Some slight experiences, more or less, in childhood might have formed the picture one way or the other. His diary, if it is ever published, will perhaps give some indication of this. The analysis proves to us again and again what a great role these atavistic brutalities play in the building up of a parapathy. And the world is always astonished if it discovers that such a "monster" has been carrying on his nefarious practices. I will merely allude to the case of Haarmann, of whom the papers have reported gruesome details. He is said to have bitten to death twenty boys and sold the human flesh, perhaps eaten of it himself. It would be an advantage for science if the alienists employed by the courts would analyze this patient thoroughly. It might then be demonstrated what circumstances brought him into this way of life. The analyst knows any number of such Haarmanns who fortunately remain hidden in the world of SADISM AND MASOCHISM their fantasies. Between the world of fantasy and of reality lies the enormous territory of the parapathies. A small screw becomes loose, and the entire cultural barrier goes to the devil. Must the fault not lie in the bad training of our youth? We shall have to enter more fully into that. 0 XVIII THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX AND ITS ANALYTIC TREATMENT ^ Men who think themselves wise believe nothing till the proof. Men who are wise believe anything till the disproof. James Elroy Flecker. I published my work Die psychische Behandlung der Epi- lepsie {The Psychic Treatment of Epilepsy^ in the year 191 1 ^ and came thereby to the following conclusions : 1. Epilepsy is more frequently a psychogenic disorder than we have hitherto believed. 2. In all cases it manifests a strong criminality, which is rejected by consciousness as unbearable. 3. The seizure is a substitute for the crime, therefore per- haps also a sexual act that is a crime (self -protection). 4. The seizure frequently arises through fear of God's pun- ishment and symbolizes guilt, punishment, and death. 5. Pseudoepilepsy is curable by means of analytic psycho- therapy. It necessitates long periods of treatment, inasmuch as the splitting of the personality has proceeded to a very great extent. This work had not the good fortune to attract the attention of neurologists to it. It was not given a test, and it was left for a long time to me to carry out the tests alone with a small amount of material. The results were so remarkable that I decided to rouse my pupils and fellow workers to continue the investigation. The material also came to me in rich streams. We are now working concentrically upon the analytic explora- tion of the ''epileptic symptom complex." In this work before us observations will be given from twelve cases out of my re- cent experience and from nine cases which my assistant, Dr. Graven, has been able to analyze under my direction and in part with my assistance. 331 SADISM AND MASOCHISM We now speak of an epileptic symptom complex and not of genuine (or essential) epilepsy. The differential diagnosis of a genuine epilepsy, that is, one not organically conditioned, is almost impossible. There is an extensive borderland, which used to be called ''hystero-epilepsy." Binswanger ^ was of the opinion (1913) that one simply had to admit that the border between organically determined and purely dynamic epilepsy was for the present still fluctuating. Redlich,* too, believes : 'Tn conclusion, it may be said that a genuine epilepsy cannot be sharply distinguished either etiolog- ically or clinically, or by pathological anatomy. It is therefore best to drop the name and concept of genuine epilepsy. For the time being, I would define merely a chronic epilepsy." Jelliffe and White,^ R. Cestan,® who represents the French school, and the Italian Roncoroni,^ to mention only a few of those who have spoken, come to the same point of view. It will perhaps be the task of a later period to resolve the collective idea of epilepsy into the various epilepsies. We shall do well for the present to use the term "epileptic symptom complex" for a disorder in which there are periodic seizures with loss of consciousness and afterward amnesia for what occurred during the attack. It is taken for granted and needs no special emphasis that the epileptic symptom complex may be of organic determination. An exact investigation with every modern means is unqualifiedly essential before treatment. Rontgen rays (Schiiller) reveal at times exostoses, residue of cranial fracture; examination for syphilis (very important!), examination of the fundus oculi, of the ears, in short, a precise status, must determine absolutely organically conditioned seizures. This does not mean that these are excluded from psychic treatment. A parapathic (psychogenic) superstructure is often formed upon an organic basis, utilizing the organic disease to obtain the pleasure premium of the parapathy (neu- rosis). (Case Number i, of Dr. Graven affords a beautiful example of that.) Cases of organic nature progressive in tendency are to be excluded (glioma or other tumor, epilepsy as result of chronic intoxication with persistence of toxic effect). The means for diagnosis thus far are inadequate for the THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 333 diagnosis of a ''genuine epilepsy." Loss of pupil reflexes with maximally distended pupils, ecchymoses in the conjunctivas and the face, cyanosis, biting of the tongue, foaming at the mouth, subsequent amnesia and stupor, postepileptic dazed condition, are just as frequent in psychogenic epilepsy as in that organ- ically derived. These means of diagnosis have not stood the test in practice. The decision must be sought through psychic research. The effort has been made recently to discover absolutely cer- tain points of departure for a true epileptic attack and to differ- entiate it from the hysterical. L. W. Weber states in a brief but valuable paper "Neurosen" (Diagnostische und therapeutiscche Irr turner und deren Ver- hiitung, Number III, Leipzig, Georg Thieme, 1917) : 'The beginning of the convulsive seizures after the thirtieth year speaks against true epilepsy.'* He lays great stress upon tongue biting and scars from tongue biting, color of the face (first pale, then dark red and dark blue — almost cyanotic — during the tonic-clonic convulsive period) involuntary urination (and defecation), positive Babinski (in the coma or after it), uni- lateral involvement of motor phenomena in the attack, and cranial scars. Petechise in the conjunctiva and skin of the face and the cerebral character of the muscular convulsions are emphasized by Jellinek. Emil Redlich (''Epilepsie und andere Anfallskrankheiten,*' Wien. med. Wochschr., 1919, No. 13), lays stress with Gasparo upon the diagnostic importance of leucopenia before the seizure^ which changes after the attack to a leucocytosis (up to 10,000 and 12,000 with simultaneous increase of the eosinophiles) and the hemilateral symptoms; difference between the tendon re- flexes right and left ; differences between the skin-stroking and tendon reflexes, pareses of one side, left-handedness, familiar left-handedness, general degenerative signs, asymmetric cranial structure, microcephaly, hydrocephaly and oxycephaly. These signs are not applicable in practice. For any one of them may fail. In the first place there are many cases of epi- lepsy which have made their appearance after the thirtieth year (late epilepsy). Babinski is absent according to Max Mayer in two thirds of the cases, according to Stiefler in a half of the SADISM AND MASOCHISM patients. Redlich thinks that only all the symptoms taken to- gether are conclusive. But it is rarely that they are all present. Modern American authors therefore give a very broad inter- pretation to the concept of epilepsy. Jelliffe and White, for example, reckon with it vasomotor and vagus attacks (Gower's borderland), brief absences with dizziness and disturbances of the sense organs (loss of vision), migraine, disturbances of sleep, also narcolepsy, fainting, and the affective epilepsy of Bratz and Leubuscher. It is becoming more and more recognized that the question '^organic disease" or psychogenesis of the attacks is the decisive matter. Individual seizures have so plainly revealed this psy- chogenesis that the attempt has been made to separate these from epilepsy. Oppenheim has described a psychasthenic epi- lepsy similar to the ill-fated hystero-epilepsy, which he has called paralepsy or psychalepsy. Bratz ^ and Leubuscher ob- served the colossal affective outbursts in interned patients with subsequent amnesia and described them as affective epilepsy. Bonhoeffer's reactive epilepsy and Daua's para-epilepsy are to be similarly conceived. If therefore one agrees with Redlich that epilepsy is uncon- ditionally an organic disorder, all these border cases have to be excluded. The separation of these cases proves impossible in practice. The psychogenesis of epilepsy and the psychogenesis of many epileptic symptoms has been clearly demonstrated through anal- ysis. For the present the Viennese psychiatrists ignore analytic results.^ Modern investigators in other countries, in contrast to the "organically" inclined Viennese school, place no value upon the accessory aids mentioned for differential diagnosis. They lay emphasis upon the epileptic character. To be sure, it strikes one that the statements concerning this epileptic character are ex- tremely variable and hardly two observers completely agree. German authors, too, have occupied themselves with the epi- leptic character. Aschaffenburg summarizes the epileptic char- acter as follows : Stubbornness, tendency to lying, egoism, hypocrisy, and bigotry, tendency to stir up strife, to boast of one's family, irritability, and inconsiderateness. In others a THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 335 stubborn obtuseness, a petty obstinacy in pursuing their own desires, and the absence of interest in other persons. It is true, of fifty epileptics only twenty-four revealed these char- acter traits. The irritability may also be entirely wanting in the periods without seizures. Ritterhaus stresses the sexual hyperexcitability, the strong motor stimulability, the obstinacy, irascibility, tendency to violence, and to periodic, and more rarely chronic, alcoholism. Binswanger emphasizes the vacil- lation of mood, the contrast between suspiciousness and child- ish, happy, innocent, cheerful attitude. Bumke stresses the strong feeling of self, deterioriation of memory, and suspicion. Kraepelin (''Zur Epilepsiefrage," Zeitschr. f. d. g. Neur. u. Psychiat.j 1919, Vol. 52), sees clearly the psychogenesis in many symptoms. The narrow-mindedness and the com- plaisance of epileptics may be explained by the impairment of memory, also of the capacity for attention ; their sanctimoni- ousness arises from a need for some one to lean upon and the hope of aid, while the euphoric mood springs from the active wish to be delivered from their illness. Redlich (1. c.) describes the epileptic character: Heightened irritability, often coupled with exaggerated courtesy, narrow- ing of the circle of interest, pronounced diminution of intel- lectual activity and alertness, disturbances of memory, circum- stantial speech losing itself in trivialities, tenaciousness, the egocentric and therefore hypochondriac attitude of the psyche, a certain optimism, often direct euphoria, then the exaggerated religiousness, which to be sure often expends itself in bigotry, sanctimoniousness, and painful observance of religious precepts. Maeder ("Die Sexualitat der Epileptiker," Jahrb. f. analyt. Forsch., 1909, Vol. I, I. F. Deuticke, Vienna), stresses the typical impulse for contact, the tenaciousness, and the de- pendence, the submissive sentimental nature, the strikingly good-natured rapport, the vanity and excessive desire to please, the envy, and the polyvalent infantile sexuality with strongly developed libido. White and Jelliffe portray the epileptic character : **The clas- sical epileptic is apt to be morose, irritable, suspicious, and hypochondriacal. He is unreliable and presents a very ag- gressive form of sentimental, shallow religiosity. This type 336 SADISM AND MASOCHISM of epileptic is usually very sensitive, irritable, and insincere. He is egocentric to a very considerable degree, paying great attention to himself, his own feelings, his state of health, his physical comforts, and his immediate surroundings. His in- terests are variable and he presents light variations of mood with perhaps headache and a tendency generally to hypochon- driacal fixations. His interests all tend to be concentrated in this egocentric constellation. His reactions of irritability and unreasonableness present infantile characteristics. Many epi- leptics are feeble-minded or more profoundly defective. These epileptics are usually lazy, frequently they lie openly, present an attitude based on high moral standards to one's face and quite the opposite when one's back is turned. Their general health is apt to be good and they often have enormous appe- tites, and are especially fond of proteids. While good-natured, even-tempered, well-disposed epileptics exist they are most apt to be most difficult problems to get along with, and as a class in the hospital they are extremely difficult to care for. Attacks of transitory ill-humor occur in seventy-eight per cent of cases. The patient is in a 'touch-me-not' state and very apt to get into quarrels or make attacks. Bleuler suggests that epileptics are already psychopaths before the disease has put its own stamp upon them. He has observed that the period of oscillation of the affects is specially prolonged and whether connected with important or unimpor- tant affairs. Thought is egocentric and not clear. Krisch lays emphasis upon the euphoric attitude toward the illness in the periods free of convulsions. This euphoria reminds one precisely of that of the feeble-minded. The ideal type in insti- tutions is industrious, orderly, ready to help. He stresses the relation of the disorder to manic-depressive psychosis ; that is, the variability of mood of the epileptic. After prolonged inves- tigations he concludes that the existence of an epileptoid char- acter must he doubted. ''The affectivity of the epileptic in the periods between attacks affords nothing striking.'' The slug- gishness and dullness in a third of the cases give a character- istic note to the patients. In going through the literature I came upon some very re- markable statements of the Italian, Bianchi. According to this THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 337 author, the epileptic character is either congenital or acquired and is manifested at a very early age. The child is less active, more dreamy than normal. It cries a good deal and without reason, often a very long time, until it is cyanotic. It insists stubbornly upon its extravagant and capricious desires and re- fuses to act reasonably in regard to them. It reacts by scratch- ing its face, smashing things, howling, screaming, stamping the feet, threatening. If we add to these things, disturbances of sleep, nightmare, pavor nocturnus, anxiety dreams in general, we have the epileptic disposition, which may reach the stage of epileptic seizures. In favorable cases these symptoms may disappear; in others they defy all treatment. The morbid char- acter develops a hypertrophy of the ego feelings. In child- hood and puberty the epileptic character of this group is like the antisocial character of the criminal. In the criminal, too, there is defect in the ability to adapt to the environment, predominance of individualistic instinct, cruelty, laziness, vaga- bondage, tendency to wandering, premature and abnormal strength of the sexual impulse, violent temper and impulsive- ness. If no convulsions appear in puberty, the individual must be considered as a criminal (it might then be that the anamnesis would mention attacks). In another group the disturbance first manifests itself when the individual leaves the family and enters school. Other character alterations become revealed as sexuality matures. The epileptic isolates himself, avoids so- ciety and stimulating conversation, turns to religion; better said, its external forms. He goes regularly to church, sings and prays at home. He becomes humble, submissive, mild. He simulates an inferior attitude and humility, respectfulness. Be- hind this mask he is irascible, resentful, violent, impulsive, and cruel. A slight occasion and the mask falls. Bianchi finds the chief traits of the epileptic character in rascibility and impulsiveness, in the tendency to brutality, to egoism, cynicism, obscenity, quarrelsomeness, impulsive actions, cruelty. He recognizes with Lombroso in the contrasts men- tioned the expression of a splitting of the personality. The American, Pierce Clark, believes in opposition to Krisch in a constant epileptic character. His penetrating, very stimu- lating, and numerous works upon epilepsy treat the theme of 338 SADISM AND MASOCHISM the congenital epileptic character. He looks upon narcissism, pathological self-love, as the fundamental characteristic. He further stresses the weakness of the affective life, slight differ- entiation and brief duration of affect (in contrast to Bleuler and many authors) and comes to the conclusion: The epileptic is incapable of genuine great affect. Clark portrays the epileptic character : egoistic, badly ad- justed to the environment, besides fixed upon it, poor worker, no fineness of spirit, no scruple or doubt, very few inhibitions against his animal instincts, often in conflict with the external world, the libido egocentric, rigid, coarse, no true friendship, no correct attitude toward the world. These traits of character correspond to the genuine epileptic, while affective epilepsy pre- sents a completely variable, much more friendly picture. He investigates this epileptic character also in the well-known historical examples of epilepsy, Caesar, Dostoevski, and Na- poleon. According to him epilepsy is therefore a fatality and may be deduced from the epileptic character. He recognizes as the third important point the progressiveness of the disease. ('T have seen none with a favorable outcome.") The end of epilepsy is the complete collapse of the personality. Deteriora- tion proceeds unchecked, and the illness terminates finally in dementia or a state related to dementia. Pierce Clark is an orthodox Freudian and is moreover a firm adherent of Freud's libido hypothesis. The epileptic seiz- ure is an outbreak of libido from the infantile unconscious. He therefore considers the attack as a dynamic eruption of the unconscious, as a flight from reality to childhood and even to fetal existence (uterine fantasy, *'metro-erotism"). The epi- leptic becomes a child in the epileptic attack. Clark tells us also how he came to know this. He returned from the hospital where he was stationed among epileptics and watched the move- ments of his three-months-old child. The similarity with the movements of the epileptics in their convulsions was so ap- parent that he felt that through careful observation he was able to confirm the identity of the muscular action in both. The movements of the epileptic are the movements which he made as a child in his mother's womb. His initial cry is the cry of the child which in an atmosphere of pain craves pleasure. The THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 339 same pain-pleasure principle dominates the epileptic. The epileptic's mouth during the seizure is very characteristic in form and like that of the child in pain. It is wide open, rec- tangular. This rectangular mouth is present in every severe epileptic status. Darwin has described it as a sign of childish anger (gnashing of the teeth !). The epileptic has like the child a great desire for sleep. If children are awakened too soon from sleep, they may tremble with anger and even fall into con- vulsions (Preyer). Epileptics, also, should not be roused after their attacks from the healing sleep. The epileptic strives to escape from pain to the mother's womb (here Clark follows the questionable hypothesis of Ferenczi) and to enjoy there the ''pleasure of omnipotence." ''Therefore" — these are his words — "the two most important features of the epileptic at- tack, the loss of consciousness and the convulsions, are psy- chical and physical correlates. The pathogenesis of epilepsy is a false or obstructed employment of the psychosexual libido." Clark in his further studies enters into the epileptic char- acter, which to him represents congenital defect (the epileptic constitution). He thus acknowledges, so to say, an epilepsy without epileptic seizures. The character of the epileptic re- veals two very characteristic traits: hypersensitivity and egoism. Clark gives also in his clinical studies an exhaustive survey of the literature up to that time, whereby, strange to say, he considers my work referred to at the beginning worthy of no mention. I showed that hate is the driving force in the epileptic psyche and attempted to discover the connections be- tween criminality and epilepsy. I found subsequently that Lombroso and Bianchi had made the same observations. Fere has likewise come to similar conclusions and laid special stress upon the jealousy of the epileptic. Clark does not pursue these indications. He sees only the hypersensitive and egoistic side, considers it inborn, and de- duces therefrom the epileptic character. He brings forward a number of case histories to prove this character. His clinical histories, however, merely go to prove that the epileptic is a parapathic. We analysts hear the same anamneses in every parapathy. Clark remains true to his libido hypothesis and SADISM AND MASOCHISM shows in his case histories that the epileptic flees from pain into the pleasure of the attack (fantasy of the mother's body). He firmly maintains that there is a defect in the affective life in all epileptics, that the disease has a tendency to deterioriation, and ends in epileptic dementia. He demon- strates from his cured cases that the seizures disappear when not too great demands are made upon epileptics and the causes which incite pain are removed. He attempts to explain this also in cases of spontaneous cure. Therapy must take account of this and guard predisposed children from injuries of the en- vironment. He recognizes also that epileptics cling to their illness and he raises the question : ''Can it be possible that these patients bring about their attacks through the wish?" He answers the question in the affirmative. ''One may determine in not a few cases that the epileptic passes through the attack with pleasure." ("They take pleasure in having seizures.") He describes this pleasure premium by a very instructive example. He recognizes likewise the protective character of the amnesia. The amnesia drops like a defensive curtain between the patient and unbearable evils and humiliations. It appears also from one history that in the attack birth and rebirth, immaculate con- ception, crucifixion, and ascension to heaven as ultimate salva- tion were all experienced. Clark sees in epilepsy a life reaction. He shows how the epileptic reacts with his seizures to all the irritations of family life, all the demands for zeal in his work, to all his humiliations, and pleads that there shall be a social training of the patient and of those individuals who manifest an epileptic character, a fitting of the work to their individual- ity. The epileptic is unable to adapt himself to society, there- fore society must adapt itself to the epileptic — is his logic. He points out the potential epileptic even in the clinical histories of three geniuses — Napoleon, Caesar, Dostoevski — to be sure, not striking examples of the progressiveness (deterioriation) of the epileptic. The error in Clark's work lies in the circumstance that he is trying to do justice to two factors, the biological and the psycho- logical. Epilepsy is to him a matter of fate. The second diffi- culty is the explanation of the attacks upon the libido hypoth- THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 341 esis. It is likewise one-sided to ascribe every seizure to a uterine fantasy. Experience shows that the epileptic often has from four to eight different types of seizures, which appear alternately, frequently in combination. One of these types is the fantasy of the mother's body. It is decidedly incorrect to find this in every attack. Clark has not mastered the technic of psychoanalysis. His analytic studies are profound anamneses and ''informative talks," in which he holds before the patients a mirror of their egoism and attempts to educate them. He clings, however, to the false thesis of the shallowness of the affective life and overlooks the fact that one all-powerful affect, hate, forces all the others into the background. He fails to see the criminal aspect of the seizures, which I emphasized in my first work and have always been able to discover. I do not believe that one should take the attitude toward the epileptic which Clark does. I have succeeded in curing the attacks in many cases without being able to change the conditions at home, and this occurred only in those cases in which the patient became social ; that is, gave up his isolation and went to work. Of course a deep analysis is necessary for this. I do not find in the dozen of Clark's writings which lie before me one single true and ex- haustive analysis. I do not wish in saying this to detract from the great value of his achievement. It is a tremendous service to have stressed the psychology of epilepsy and to have sought new methods for its cure. Moreover, the comparison between the child and the epileptic has been most happily made. Yet I believe that the epileptic is not a defective individual ; he is, like every para- pathic, a phenomenon of reversion and shows the primitive primal reactions of primitive men. Hatred is according to my conception primary in man. The epileptic retains his atti- tude of hate, through it falls into conflict with his environment and with society, seeks protection in religion, and finds it in his seizures. The attack performs the important function of defense. The deterioriation, the progressiveness, is not connected with con- genital defect. It rests upon the fact that the unconscious SADISM AND MASOCHISM realm becomes all the while greater in extent, that fresh layers are ever being placed upon the original nucleus, that new types of seizures develop, that the structure of the latter becomes ever more complex. The splitting between consciousness and the unconscious grows greater and greater, with the pleasure in quality and quantity lying upon the unconscious side. Fi- nally, the pleasure principle has overcome the reality principle (Freud). The individual tends toward the side of the greater pleasure. Clark overlooks the significance of the infantile and later traumata. Epilepsy is precisely a disease which utilizes the trauma as the nucleus of a pathological systematic structure. These traumata can of course be found only through a pro- foundly penetrating analysis. The discovery of the traumata does not yet mean cure. The main thing is the employment of the traumata in the seizure with variation and heightening of pleasure according to the law of the return of the same (Nietzsche). But we cannot under- stand the attacks unless we know what they mean. And it is too easy and too simple to assert that all movements are em- bryonic muscular activities. It does not according to my ex- perience correspond with the truth. Certainly this type would prevail in a status or in many seizures, but there are attacks which according to a definite scheme represent a complicated action. Of this later! We may still mention, before we enter into the psychogenesis of epilepsy, that in the most recent times this disposition toward epilepsy is spoken of by German authors as a heightened ''readiness for convulsions." Redlich calls it the ''epileptic capacity for reaction." It seems to be absent from no person. Redlich (Lewandowsky, Handbuch der Neurologie. Supple- mentary Volume, 1923, Julius Springer) says concerning the epileptic capacity for reaction: "My point of departure is that every brain, even the normal, may suffer epileptic attacks, if the stimulus acting upon it is intensive enough." This is not, as Pollack thinks, a purely hypothetical assumption, but a fact. For we find, as is well known, epileptic seizures appearing in certain circumstances even in individuals hitherto normal, after injury to the brain, for example, gunshot wounds of the skull, THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 343 effect of foreign bodies upon the brain, after operation, and so on, in intoxications (carbon monoxide poisoning, cocaine pois- oning), in revived cases of hanging, and the Hke. Epileptic attacks, as we know, can be precipitated also experimentally in animals and likewise in man through electric stimulation of the cerebral cortex; these seizures may later reappear under cer- tain circumstances. The epileptic attack is therefore a patholog- ical form of reaction of the brain; this naturally does not ex- plain it, but it does give a point of departure for a clear inter- pretation of the facts. For although in the last analysis an epileptic seizure may be provoked in any brain, yet it is charac- teristic of the epileptic that these seizures make their appear- ance on stimuli which normally do not determine an epileptic attack; that is, in the epileptic the epileptic capacity for reac- tion is heightened, increased. If permanently, we have a chronic epilepsy before us; if transitorially, then the situation is that of 'the appearance of isolated seizures,' or the so-called ^acute epilepsy' with repeated attacks in a restricted period of time." If the epileptic seizure is only a pathological form of reac- tion of the brain, we still have to propound the question how and when this pathological reaction takes place. Our experi- ence shows that it is a matter of the effect of anger, which presses toward action as an affective discharge of hatred, which in the uninhibited is carried out, in the inhibited finds release for the impulse in the convulsion. This anger manifests itself even in early childhood; it takes the form of an affective con- vulsion, inasmuch as all children show an increased readiness for convulsive seizures. The French Cestan (1. c), in opposition to Pierce Clark and other authors, describes the epileptic character : The epileptic is most frequently a sad individual, a pessimist, oppressed with his sense of inferiority; he is often violent-tempered, revenge- ful, active mentally {un esprit mobile), subject to vacillations of mood, changing rapidly his extraordinary good nature into passionate anger, falling from liveliness and cheerfulness into gloomy melancholy and — just as suddenly — breaking out with peculiar violence even on trivial occasions. All investigators lay emphasis upon the violent anger of SADISM AND MASOCHISM epileptics, as well as upon the apparent discrepancy between stimulus and reaction. Analysis has explained these condi- tions.* We see from this that the epileptic finds himself in a height- ened affective readiness}^ His indifference is only apparent. The superficiality of the emotional reaction is a consequence of the narrowing of his mental horizon. He is under the dom- ination of a fixed idea. It is for this reason that trivial things excite him, while great ones leave him cold. It always depends upon the associative value of the stimulus. If the incitement touches upon his complex (upon his sore point) the entire affec- tive energy at his disposal is discharged. Jelliffe and White, in fact, find in the epileptic seizure a release of the stored-up energy, as they wish in general to explain epilepsy upon the principle of energy. Analysis of different cases of epilepsy has shown me that in every seizure it is a matter of the acting out of an impulse. This impulse expresses itself in the various movements of the patient. We shall have more to say of this later. The absence of the pupil reflex corresponds to a spasm of the pupils, such as occurs up to a certain point with any strong affect or with every affective attitude. If one examines an angry child one will find the same spasm transitorially of the dilatator pupillse. Janet has referred to the fact that the concentric restriction of the field of vision is the somatization of the restriction of the mental field of vision. The epileptic in the attack is totally fixed upon his one idea. One comes again and again upon the same phenomenon in analyzing many epileptics : upon their tremendous readiness to hate. This hatred is directed often against society, against in- dividual members of the family, against certain institutions. The epileptic is either religious or a fanatical freethinker. He loves at times to utter blasphemies or to mock at religion. In his inner nature the epileptic is profoundly religious and has a heavy sense of guilt, which may be greatly augmented after the seizures.^^ This inner piety leads the epileptic to suppress his hatred and often to overcompensate in love for his neigh- *It is not possible to distinguish always whether the citations in this chapter are given in original form or as the author's abstract or comment. THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 345 bor. He cannot endure the surging of his hatred. He flees from it into the unconscious. He becomes outwardly often gentle, kindly, helpful : Christ without and — Satan within. If there is a disposition toward epilepsy, it consists in the splitting of the personality which causes the epileptic to lead a double life: one of fantasy and one of reality. The fantasies find vent in sleep, in waking dreams, in seizures. Each attack entangles the epileptic more thoroughly in the web of his fixed ideas, brings him deeper into the realm of fantasy, makes him more and more introverted. The progressive character of epi- lepsy rests upon the progress of the introversion and is un- fortunately often a result of wrong treatment. These patients, inasmuch as they live in a world of fantasy, escape every task which would divert them, and utilize their seizures to make themselves socially useless and to permit themselves to be maintained by their families or the state. They become more completely absorbed year by year in their dream world. The physician's task is to make them once more social ; that is, to lead them back to reality. The first step in their improvement is the curtailment of their sleep. The less the epileptic sleeps, the more quickly will he recover. The second step is the education for work. Usually the epileptic produces an attack in the place of business, where he should be at work, so as to make himself socially impossible. He learns in analysis to recognize this tendency and overcome it. Provision must however be made that he shall carry on his work in spite of the attacks. Then one often finds the seizures disappearing after some time or they appear at long intervals (six to eight weeks), sometimes only at night, so that the pa- tient is not disturbed at his business. The greatest injury is done however through routine treat- ment with narcotics. Bromide, opium, luminal, bromural, and all such means are absolutely to be forbidden and are to be considered only in case of actually organic epileptic symptom complex with progressive tendency (brain tumor, exostoses, cicatrices, intoxication, and the like). Every narcotic measure enforces the state of daydreaming, 346 SADISM AND MASOCHISM increases the introversion. The attacks sometimes cease with this therapy or become less frequent, because the epileptic dis- charges his sadistic impulse in dreamy states or in very pro- found slumber, for which he has no memory. The attacks which appear in many epileptics during normal sleep show that the epileptic needs a more profound narcosis than the usual slumber, the visions of which can be recalled as dreams if they are laden with strong affect. He requires total amnesia after the seizure. He dares not recall his fantasies. One will find frequently in the epileptic a sort of ''prepara- tory amnesia." I have seen epileptic women who could remem- ber nothing of the occurrences of the previous day. A case described in one of my books is particularly worthy of mention. The patient recalled nothing of the experience which is the greatest in the life of a woman : the bridal night. As the analy- sis revealed, another experience had preceded the wedding night which she had completely forgotten (repressed). A friend who accompanied her to the^ doctor's said : '*Do you not re- member that you were with me in a hotel room and your lover came to us then?" The patient denied it. Then the friend gave a dramatic description of the different scenes, traces of which were plainly to be demonstrated in the attack, which I was able to observe.^* She repeated in every seizure the occur- rence which had been lost to her conscious memory. She always lived through the one scene. The more frequently the seizures come, the more does this scene become the preponderating idea. At last the condition resembles catatonia, which, too, represents only the "fixed ges- ture of memory." Another epileptic woman affirmed that she could no longer recall occurrences which took place an hour ago. I considered this condition the result of severe bromide intoxication. I began her treatment as I begin every treatment, with the sud- den withdrawal of the doses of bromide. But after two weeks without bromide the patient still insisted most obstinately that she had completely lost her memory. She could give me no information in regard to the dreams, produced scanty recol- lections, with which she was always emphasizing her inability to remember. She had, like most of these patients, an increas- THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 347 ingly restricted interest in the external world. She did not live for the present. She scarcely read the newspapers or magazines, was anaesthetic in the arms of her husband (before the doctors had forbidden intercourse), read no books, had to be forced to go to the theater, where she was frightfully bored, continued to yawn, and finally fell asleep. Her stubborn re- sistance to my efforts to turn her toward reality and to extra- version was so striking that I said to the patient to her face: "You do not want to get well !" She had a companion who always accompanied her and looked after her entire household. This woman followed me into the anteroom and told me that the patient had called to hei before falling asleep : ''That wicked doctor ! He wants to rob me of the most beautiful thing I have ever found in my whole life! My attacks! I will not give them up!" All these patients — no matter how much they plead for help and dwell upon how exceedingly happy they would be to be cured, that they would so gladly work — all these patients have a ''defective conscience toward health" (Kohnstamm), a strong, often obdurate, will to sickness. This will to sickness arises from the pleasure premium which the seizure affords. It brings the secret pleasure pre- mium of a wish-fulfillment, furthermore, the possibility of escaping toil, of living out the fantasies, dominating the family and placing the latter in the patient's service.^^ Relatives, especially mothers, do the greatest harm in treat- ment, for they make use of the patient's weakness to enhance their maternal instinct for affectionate care. They live in constant fear of the seizures; they force medicines upon the pa- tients ; they will not let them go out without a companion ; they commiserate them, fear that they will overexert themselves, and so on. The treatment must however, after forbidding the patient the bromide, take away the supports which he has hitherto used. He has to learn to overcome his fear of an attack, and his first task is to come alone to the consultation and not have himself "accompanied." The twenty-year-old daughter of a physician, who had suf- fered from epilepsy since she was five, lived in a small town in 348 SADISM AND MASOCHISM the neighborhood of Vienna. She had every day from two to five attacks, in which she was cared for by her mother and sister. The father had to watch over merely the regular morn- ing seizures. In these morning attacks she would tear her garment from her body, so that her father was forced to see her naked. The father quieted her, massaged her back, stroked her, and finally gave her a glass of water to drink. The third day I stipulated that the girl should pass through her attacks without the assistance of her family and must come to me unaccom- panied. 'Tmpossible,'' exclaimed the father. ''She will fall under the wheels ! She will be run over !" — ''Let me," cried the daughter, "I will come alone!" — And she came four months without a companion, never had an attack on the journey — only at home. The seizures had always before this appeared in the circle of the family, or if she went to walk with the family, and were designed to control the family and draw upon her- self their entire attention and love. The hate tendency directed itself particularly against the older healthy sister, who was studying medicine, while all intellectual activity was strictly forbidden the patient. I permitted her to study again (type- writing, stenography) and read many books. She made as- tonishing progress and married some months after finishing the successful analysis. She manifested those character traits which are absent in no epileptic : jealousy and envy. I will report her analysis in another place. I am speaking here only of the necessary training in independence. This education often proceeds under hard struggle. The epileptic does not want to give up having some one "accom- pany" him. He may even during the treatment, when he is in a state of defiance, provoke seizures to prove to the family that he needs such a person to be with him. The most startling result of my analyses and of those of my pupils is the fact that the patients admit that they could pro- duce their attacks at will. The boundary line between simulation and genuine seizure can scarcely be drawn. The epileptic prepares himself through "pumping up his affect" and brings himself into an affect intoxication which makes possible the precipitation of an attack. THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 349 Every neurologist who served in the war as army physician must admit that the number of epileptics was enormously in- creased in the war and that it was often difficult to distinguish the simulants from the genuine patients. An army surgeon told me that in Italy he was able to simulate a true Babinski and in this way was released from prison. (I have tried it myself and every time I have succeeded in creating a true Babinski.) I was obliged as medical chief of a neurological station to give my opinion upon hundreds of epileptics. I came at last to the conviction that many individuals present the above-mentioned ''readiness to convulsion," and that flight into the seizure can sometimes be produced with the aid of the will. The case of a young man of thirty-four years is instructive who simulated attacks in the war in order to be sent home, and after the war was no longer in control of these seizures (''those which I summoned, the spirits, I am no longer free of their power"). He was then firmly convinced that he had challenged God and for this reason must be punished with epilepsy. These staged attacks always appear if the epileptic finds him- self deprived of love and his readiness for hatred would trans- form itself into the hate impulse. The mother, for example, wants to go to the theater. The patient is to remain alone at home. Before her departure there is a "colossal seizure" so that the mother has to stay home. Another patient progresses so far that he is able to take a position as stenotypist. After a week he produces an attack at business after his chief has reprimanded him. The epileptic is able to react to every humili- ation with a seizure, by which he then revenges himself upon his tormentor. Characteristic of the ability to simulate an attack is the fol- lowing scene related by Trousseau : "We were a number of army physicians and were talking of the frequency of simulants who wanted to be released from military service through the diagnosis of epilepsy; but we con- vinced ourselves that genuine epilepsy presented such unmis- takable symptoms that any experienced clinician could make the diagnosis. One man thought that only a clever physician could simulate the disease. Esquirol doubted even this possibility. But he was deceived and on the following occasion. One time SADISM AND MASOCHISM after a visit at the "maison de Charenton," Esquirol, Calmail, and I were speaking in regard to the theme mentioned. Calmail suddenly fell to the floor and writhed in convulsive jerking. Esquirol examined him and cried out: 'The poor fellow is an epileptic !' Scarcely had he said the word when Calmail sprang up and asked him whether he still thought that epilepsy could not be simulated." I know of several cases where shrewd simulants have de- ceived experienced neurologists, the first in their profession. For me there is thus no doubt that the epileptic can produce his attacks — and sometimes from conscious motives. The patient permits himself to be submerged in his seizure. Why? The outcry : "The doctor wants to rob me of the most beauti- ful thing I have ever found in my whole life!" shows that the attack offers a large pleasure premium. The seizure is there- fore in many cases one provoked by the patient. He is not overtaken by an attack, but he often falls willingly into one. He is overpowered by the unconscious, but it is a case of that famous ''vis hand ingrata" [violence by no means unwelcome] which plays so familiar a role in the rape of women. For this reason patients cannot forego their attacks, and they withdraw more and more into their fantasy life. Dostoevski was honorable enough to admit this : ''You healthy people have no idea of the feeling of joy that we epileptics experience be- fore the seizure. Mohammed must certainly have had his fvision of paradise in an epileptic convulsion, for he was ill of this disease just as much as I am." He writes once that he would give years of his life to be able to experience again this feeling of delight. The aura often commences with the first feelings of sexual pleasure. Increase of the pleasure is then experienced during the attack. One of Dr. Ph. Craven's patients had as an aura a severe itching in the anus. He experienced in the seizure a pederastic scene with his brother, which had occurred some years before. Maeder studied the connection between "sexuality and epi- lepsy" {Jahrhiich, Vol. I, 1909. Franz Deuticke, Vienna) upon a large amount of material, to be sure, superficially; that is. without profound analysis. The connection between onanism THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 351 and seizure impressed him, too. Many epileptics masturbate in the attack or in the dazed condition which succeeds it. ''Mas- turbation," says Maeder, "is often found in connection with the acute phenomena of epilepsy; it appears, for example, pre- or postparoxysmally during a giddiness, in absences and twilight states, but also in the intervals, especially under the influence of an affect, perhaps as an equivalent, if it is carried out in paroxysmal form." Onanism is often shamelessly performed, even by those who are not severely demented, particularly among younger patients (for instance, during medical exam- ination). It is striking that the sadomasochistic complex of epileptics escaped Maeder. 'T was unable," he says, "to dem- onstrate it very clearly in any case and found also in the litera- ture no corresponding material." The reason for this is that epileptics very cleverly conceal their sadism. They have usually two forms of onanism. A permitted one, which is bound with normal fantasies, and a forbidden one, which must expend it- self in the convulsion. In contrast to Maeder, my cases have never manifested this shamelessness, as it perhaps does not appear before introversion and regression have proceeded far. The seizure often betrays the concealed onanistic fantasy. One should not conceive of the attacks as formed upon so simple a scheme. On the one hand, every epileptic has various types of attack ; on the other, the most varied motives are con- densed in the seizure as in the dream, and as Freud has shown for the hysterical attack.^'' The epileptic is at the same time both active and passive; he experiences birth and death, some- times rebirth. One thing is sure, the seizure imitates the joy in dying. It is well known that persons want to die at the supreme moment of the orgasm. The life instinct and its polar opposite, the death instinct, find expression in the sharpest con- trasts (Tristan at the height of his joy: "Oh, let me die!"). Of course it is very difficult to bring the epileptic to admit this "death pleasure." The pleasure often resides entirely in the unconscious in the fantasy that accompanies the seizure. What is visible after the convulsion is many times the blissful calm after the siorm, often the frightful wretchedness as after an act of crime. The attack mimics the death struggle and dying (Kretsch- SADISM AND MASOCHISM mer's death-posture reflex). The epileptic flees the dangers of Hfe into a temporary death, then to be reborn. The delirium of the epileptic has been observed by Schindler and it affords frequently fantasies of birth and death. The patient dies; he returns to Mother Earth. In many cases — perhaps in most — a ''uterine fantasy" can be plainly determined, which agrees with Clark's observations. Yet one must guard against resolving the epileptic symptom complex with one key. Actually it is always a matter of flight from reality or the discharge of an impulse. This impulse may have a regressive tendency ; that is, it may repeat an experience of the past or represent a wish- fulfillment, which is to make possible what cannot be experi- enced. There is regression in all cases of epilepsy, as I have de- scribed in Psychosexueller Infantilismits}^ The epileptic be- comes in the seizure once more a child and manifests the primi- tive original reaction. The discharge of feces and urine in the attack, eating and smearing with feces in the delirium, onanism, exhibitionism, are to be considered regressive processes. They appear particularly in the cases in which there is a "uterine fantasy" or a birth fantasy. The seizure goes back in its regressive tendency not only to birth and the mother's body; it goes even further to primitive man. Jelliffe and White correctly state : ''The low instinctive level to which the epileptic is reduced by his seizure can be appre- ciated by observing his activities as he is 'coming out' of the attack. His respiration is at first distinctly abdominal (infan- tile type), he makes characteristic sucking movements with his lips, and his movements, from the complete disorganization into which they have been thrown, assume at first an aimless fum- bling with his clothes, a tentative feeling about as he instinc- tively tries to readjust himself to reality, to 'find himself again. In this tentative 'feeling about' he repeats in a few minutes the process of relating himself to reality which is a normal period of development in the child." The authors extend the comparison further and arrive at last at the mother-womb fantasy, called by Clark "metro-ero- tism." (Clark, too, refers to the baby talk, the fetal position THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 353 [covers drawn over the head in bed, the legs pressed against the body], the urination during or after the attack as symptoms of psychosexual infantilism.) But they guard themselves against generalizations ! Every epileptic, say Jelliffe and White, must be looked upon as an individual problem. Genuine epilepsy is a life reaction.^^ It is absolutely certain that the regression can manifest dif- ferent degrees. It is perhaps best to classify the seizures ac- cording to the intensity of the regression, in which one should consider that during an attack the regression may increase and pass through different stages! Besides, the law of polarity must be observed. The seizure will show not only a regressive but a progressive tendency. The patient enters heaven, he experiences a resurrection, he is Christ, he speaks with God; or he enters hell and witnesses the terror of the Last Judgment. We have learned that all parapathic symptoms are of more than one dimension in their structure. The seizure reveals the same work of condensation as other parapathic phenomena. If we have received the impression that it is a matter of a single fantasy, it is because usually in the fantasies as a whole there is one dominant one, which gives the seizure its charac- teristic stamp. Now that I have presented these reservations, one will un- derstand how difficult it is to comprehend the seizures in a sys- tem. We can also start from different viewpoints. We may consider the severity of the seizure and erect a scale from the absences, fainting, the brief loss of consciousness, to the status epilepticus with its subsequent delirium. That was the old principle, but it took no account of the psychogenesis. I conceive of using the strength of the regression, for didac- tic reasons and as the basis of the therapy, as the means of classification. It is indeed evident that the possibility of cure depends upon how far the regression has retreated from the actual situation; that is, from reality. I might take as the first type : I. The epileptic flees from an intolerable situation into an affective ecstasy or a swoon. The cases of affective epilepsy described by Bratz belong in this category. A man who finds himself robbed of his freedom 354 SADISM AND MASOCHISM begins in prison to rage and smash everything. Complete amnesia after the attack. The regressions often vary and reach the greatest degree. The simplest cases are those with fainting fits. A v^oman sees her husband getting into a quarrel. At the moment that his opponent throws himself upon her hus- band, she falls in a swoon. Here belong also the "sweet faint- ing fits" which I have described in Conditions of Nervous Anx- iety. They represent autoerotic acts with abolition of moral consciousness. 2. The epileptic passes through a definite experience from a recent period. We may assume for man prehistoric period, antiquity (earliest childhood) ; Middle Ages (puberty until twenty) ; and recent time. Naturally this pertains to adults. For a youth who is at puberty a trauma that belongs to two years previously is one of recent date. The classification is therefore relative. It is certain that man forgets his childhood, regards it as an- tiquity. Few memories reach into that ancient period. Anal- ysis tries, so far as it is necessary for a cure and so far as it is possible, to remove this amnesia, which I consider a necessary provision for the psyche. In most cases actual situations come into consideration. It would however do violence to the truth if one did not admit that traumatic and important experiences may reach very far back into childhood and may form the crystallization point for the epileptic attack. The second category presents a regression which often reaches back but a few years. The amnesia just mentioned for the recent past is present in all these cases. If we come in an epileptic upon this amnesia for recent events and experiences, we may be sure that he has repressed a recent occurrence; he does not want to see it or recall it, but repeats it in his attack. Examples : The student who reproduces the homosexual ex- perience with his brother. The married woman who had per- formed fellatio in the presence of her friend. Disturbances of the Impulses and the Emotions, and always reproduced it in her seizure. A soldier who experiences again the strangling of an opponent. A girl who passes in her attacks through the seduction by her father. He came home intoxicated, tore ofT her clothes, and deflowered her. In the attack she tears her THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 355 clothing from her body, defends herself against his violence, and yields. In all these cases the experience seems to be completely re- pressed from conscious memory. The characteristic thing in these attacks is that the move- ments and the facial expression repeat these specific scenes. This type resembles most the hysterical and has been called hystero-epilepsy. The student makes in the convulsion the characteristic movements with the buttocks. He first defends himself, then submits. The woman smacks with her tongue, makes sucking movements with her mouth. The soldier be- comes cyanotic and rattles like one being strangled, of which we will speak further. The girl repeats the outcry which she uttered as her father deflowered her. A case from my practice, which I had Dr. Graven analyze, is very characteristic. The patient came into the room and saw his mother hanging on the cross work of the window. Instead of cutting her down, he ran to fetch his father, humming a melody as he went. The father came in haste. It was too late. The mother was dead. In the attack the patient drops his head forward just as he saw his mother hanging and sticks out his tongue. We see that the seizure in this case means not only pleasure, but repeats the reproach. It is like a lasting warning : "You are a heartless person ! You are your mother's murderer ! God will punish you and you will nevermore have any feeling!" The patient manifests a complete anccsthesia of both arms as a somatization of his lack of feeling."^ He can stick needles deep into his flesh vrithout moving an eyelash. The anaesthesia dis- appears in the course of the analysis, but he can produce it at will, so strong is his conscious influence upon his body. He admits also that he can produce his attacks at any time. He carries with him a card with his home address. If he is tired, he produces a convulsion and the Humane Society brings him home. But this patient presents various types of attack. One is the repetition of the traumatic scene and always appears when the associations awaken the voice of conscience. The condensation of motives is again in evidence, which 356 SADISM AND MASOCHISM must always be kept in mind. The patient has a fantasy of performing upon the mother a forbidden act. His flight from the dead body or the still living, defenseless mother is now comprehensible. We have to do with acts bordering upon necrophilia. The attack is a warning and at the same time a repetition compulsion with better use of the situation. Analysis shows that the seizures occur always with definite associations. They are chiefly associations connected with the dead, with graveyard, hearse, or hanging and choking. Redlich (1. c.) summarizes the features of the epileptic seizure: appearance of the attack without known cause, occur- rence of it at night in sleep, which is never the case in hysteria, typical course with the distinguishing marks of the epileptic seizure, absence of pupillary reflex, biting of the tongue, urina- tion after the attack, petechise of skin and conjunctiva, leu- cocytosis, rather distinct signs of speech disturbances, and pareses after the attack; that is, reflex disorders, psychic dis- turbances of a characteristic sort. The first of these statements is absolutely incorrect. The cause is always present; it is unknown only to the physician untrained in analysis. In a case of Tremmel,^^ the seizure ap- peared after a visit to the cemetery. In a similar case, which I observed, the attack occurred in the cemetery. According to Tremmel, epileptics are frequent visitors at graveyards. I was able to discover in my case evident necrophiliac tendencies. This explains the occasion for the attack. The petechias are a result of the hypera^mia, which again is attributable to the idea of strangling. Many an epileptic enacts a scene of strangu- lation. This fact explains the phenomenon mentioned by Tsiminaki and confirmed by Flesch and Lowy.^^ (This sign of Tsiminaki is the precipitation of an epileptic convulsion through compression of the carotid.) I was able to observe the carotid phenomenon in about thirty- five per cent of the cases in the military hospital. If it is posi- tive, it makes a truly astounding impression. The patients fall like a flash. The seizure often begins at once, but this phenom- enon has nothing to do with the carotid. It appears also if one takes the patient by the throat and lightly chokes him. It is the choking fantasy which releases the seizure. THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 357 I seize the patient by the neck. At this moment he has the impulse to choke me. I set free his choking fantasy, which is in a state of affective preparedness. With this belongs the fact which many physicians do not know, that choking sets free in certain individuals feelings of pleasure and even an orgasm. These are evidently persons for whom choking represents their adequate satisfaction (lust murderers). This is attested also by the fact that in those who are hanged there is frequently erection and ejaculation. There are also onanists who make use of choking and self -strangula- tion for their onanism. Such cases are according to my ex- perience not so rare. I allude to the cases of Runge and Haas.^^ Case Number 51. A psychopath, twenty years old, mild, sensi- tive, uncontrolled, somewhat weak-willed, but well-endowed, with a rather feminine cast in his psychical and physical habitus, delicate physical constitution, strong sexual impulse, coming especially on his mother's side from an evidently degenerated family, fell ill at the age of eighteen and a half shortly after his final examinations with a long-protracted "grippe'' with slight catarrhal symptoms and certain nervous manifestations. Following upon this, gradual development of a not very serious akinetic-hypertonic syndrome with poverty of movement and motor retardation, slight rigidity of the arm, anomalies of posture, respiratory disturbances in the form of tachypnoic attacks, disturbances of sleep, and psychic anomalies after an intermediate stage characterized by weakness of will, apathy, lack of initiative, loss of sleep, and gradual devel- opment of the respiratory disturbances, while at the same time an unfortunate love affair greatly depressed the patient. In con- sequence, suicidal thoughts and, after a year and a half of suffer- ing, attempt to strangle himself. He noticed thereby a feeling of pleasure ; and after this there was very frequent impulsive repeti- tion of the attempts at strangling, in which a sort of orgasm ap- peared, and in the carrying out of which all inner and outer re- straints were recklessly cast aside. Failure of all therapeutic measures. At the same time querulous and fault-finding in be- havior ; later more apathetic, irresolute, often foolishly infantile ; transitory brief reactive depressions ; total neglect of self ; except for the pathological impulsive action, absence of every incentive. Attempts at stransrulation continued for more than a year with 358 SADISM AND MASOCHISM varying intensity and frequency, alternating somewhat with the respiratory disturbance. At times pronounced tetanic seizures. After the choking impulse had continued for over a year, it was removed through repeated hypnoses, and the psychic disturbances improved. Slight signs of amyostasis still exist (Runge). The patient noticed at once with the first attempt at strangu- lation a feeling of pleasure. It was a voluptuous sense of giddi- ness, like the feeling that overcomes one on a height. It was a feeling coming instinctively from the unconscious. "I need that sense of giddiness; I must have it!" The most beautiful mo- ment is that just before he discontinues the strangling. In this moment the patient presents an orgastic excitement. Runge considers the case one of masked onanism, while the patient in- sists it is not a sexual feeling. The fact in this case is sugges- tive that the regression set in when he suffered grievous disappointment in love. Unfortunately this very interesting case was not studied analytically. No inquiry w^as made as to the presence of active tendencies toward the strangulation of others. The case seems to me, however, to reveal plainly a type like the epileptic ; that of patients who experience in themselves what they want to do to others. The appearance of fantasies of strangling and strangulation with onanism after som^^ one's death is striking. Haas's case belongs here. Case Number 52. A girl of twelve, illegitimate. Mother nervous, frivolous, died when the child was eleven and a half of pulmonary tuberculosis with fits of suffocation. The child thus far had presented nothing unusual. Soon after the mother's death she changed psychically. Inattentive. Her schoolmates noticed in school that the patient choked herself, which she finally did boldly even during class. Attempts at discipline, threats, stern measures, did not help ; on the contrary the choking became more frequent, probably fifteen to thirty times a day. She crept under the bed, under the stove, hid in the closet, in order to be undisturbed. The skin of the neck became torn away; a plaster collar was of no use ; she forced her fingers under it, and the choking continued. Medi- cation failed. She was put for several months in a restraining jacket, but no sooner was it rem.oved than the choking began again. — Physical examination revealed nothing special, nor did the child THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 359 present any psychic anomalies. In strangling she grasped her throat with both hands, tried to surround it, squeezed and pressed the soft parts and the larynx together as much as possible. The pulse would at the same time rise from 76 to no, respiration was accelerated, the face reddened. Pupils were enlarged, glistened; then cyanosis, breathing became rattling ; not seldom the lids sank ; legs were stretched out, feet flexed plantar wise. The act lasted twenty to forty seconds. Then relaxation ; the child laid the head to one side, remained for some minutes in this position or fell asleep. In hypnosis the child said that she had eaten some pan- cakes the day of her mother's death, after which she was sick. In order to vomit she had pressed her throat, at which she had noticed the absence of pain and found that such pleasant sensation arose from her stomach upward that she almost lost her senses. She often repeated this and always felt this delightful sensation. Later she was obsessively compelled to do it if she thought about it. Hypnotic treatment brought improvement, though not com- plete cure. — Twice later tetanic convulsive seizures in the arms were observed. Chvostek and Trousseau were negative. Haas observed a young captain who reached an orgasm in a peculiar way. He twisted a towel about his neck, into the ends of which, provided with holes, he slipped his feet ; by bending the hip and knee joints and by stretching his legs he brought about strangulation and orgasm. He was found one day in this situa- tion choked to death. . . . I know some cases which belong here. I also know the type of men who must slightly choke their love objects to have an orgasm. Onanists usually enact the strangling on their own penis. It is interesting that persons of this type reveal a particularly high valuation of their own hand. This accentuation of the hands in epileptics drew Maeder's attention. He admits that many can answer questions as to how they are feeling only after consulting their hands and testing them in various ways. Sometimes there are tic movements of the hands, especially convulsive clenching of the hands. This choking mechanism is still more plainly in evidence during the attack. We must assume that we have to do with a primitive hate reflex. The weapon of primitive man was the hand. He could strike or strangle, the latter much more surely bringing about 36o SADISM AND MASOCHISM his opponent's death. This type becomes cyanotic in the con- vulsion, of which I will speak later. I come after this digression to the third type. 3. The epileptic experiences a trauma of early childhood. In this case the regression goes back to early childhood. Examples : A girl was the victim at six of a cunnilingus on the part of her brother of ten. Seizures since the eighth year, in which she shows a transfigured countenance. Maeder's case (1. c, p. 130) is very typical. A woman of thirty-six having rare seizures will lie in bed two or three weeks with one of these without speaking. At times refusal of food and de- pression. Partial amnesia on waking. She had died and autopsy had been performed. (She belongs also in another category. ) It had been discovered that she did not suffer from epilepsy but ''heart pain," that she could live again (rebirth!). Her brother was condemned by the court and had been seized with epileptic fits. She does not want to know anything of sexual experiences. Maeder in a ''partial analysis" learned in a fragmentary way that she had experienced a sexual attack when she was five and again at twelve. The seizures began shortly after the second attack. A long dreamlike state after the seizure. In this long dream (twilight state) she has sexual intercourse with her formal instructors, with the pastor, with the factory director and the overseer, and with certain doctors who have treated her. This case shows regression to the fifth year of age (experi- ence with the brother?), dying, forgiveness, and rebirth into a new life. The case is typical. One frequently finds intercourse with brothers or sisters among epileptics, likewise aggressions in early years. Maeder found them in six girls ; two male patients had already at the age of six practiced regular sexual inter- course with their sisters. 4. The seizure repeats the scene of birth. 5. The attack carries the regression back to the embryonic period (prehistoric life).^® Case Number 53. An o^^icial of thirty-three years of age, an accountant in a large bank. He feels that this position is too low THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 361 for him. He has taken his doctor's degree and had wanted certainly to become bank director. He is one of four brothers and sisters ; he envies the others and in part dominates them through his illness. The course of his illness is mild. He has one convulsion in two or three months, always in the evening or the morning. The next day he feels as if "newborn." All is fresh and pure within. He calls his seizures his crises and feels even some days before them a slight depression and a sickness of the stomach (both premonitory signs are frequent). He seems to present a transfigured countenance sometimes in the seizures. The first attack at the office occurred after a "renewed" humili- ation in business (he was passed over at a promotion). Before this he had concealed his disorder. Now it was known to his chief and his colleagues that he was an epileptic. He had arranged the seizure so that he would lose his position. He was referred to me for treatment after a sojourn in a sanatorium had made his con- dition worse. The seizures now came every week. Complete re- covery after three months of treatment ; the details of the analysis will be published in another place. I will merely mention one of the patient's dreams : I am swimming in a pool, which continues to grow narrower and passes into a canal. I come to a small place, where I force myself through a grating. I come to a meadow where many naked people are running about in the sunshine. This patient experiences in every seizure a rebirth. The forc- ing himself through the narrow canal and through the grating symbolizes birth. He comes into a new country — paradise. Most of his dreams are of similar type. He presents otherwise, too, every sign of a uterine fantasy. I call attention on this occasion to the importance of the dream analysis. If one gets an epileptic to remember and relate his dreams, one obtains a profound insight into his unconscious psychic life and the motives of his seizure. Dreams are often recalled which have preceded the attack. One then knows how the patient seeks to escape the "specific epileptic constellation," how the substitute satisfactions come about, or how he takes his first steps toward his secret goal in order that he may finally experience in the attack the wish-fulfillment or the warning. One will find in every good analysis such a key dream, with 362 SADISM AND MASOCHISM which one can solve the riddle of the epileptic symptom com- plex. This key dream then often contains the various motives^ so that the condensation work of the seizure may also be recog- nized. There are people who are very ambitious and sensitive but very dissatisfied with their success in life. Desire and ability are in glaring contrast. Reality and fantasy will not meet. Life seems to them empty and meaningless. The thoughts are always wandering to childhood. This type is ''eternally a child," as I have described it in Psychosexiieller Infantilisnius. It represents the kind-hearted, cheerful, apparently satisfied person. The patient is completely dominated by the fantasy of the mother's womb. He sometimes lives in solitude so that he can give himself up to his fantasies and be the "only one." Sometimes he comes from a large family of children. He has a grotesque fantasy of killing his brothers and sisters in the mother's body and of coming into the world as the firstborn. This type is extraordinarily frequent. One will seldom find an epileptic who has not passed through rebirth in one or an- other of his seizures. This has been confirmed through the exact investigations of Pierce Clark. These cases present the character of progressiveness ("deterloriation"), and ultimately the patient becomes absorbed in his embryonic existence — he becomes demented. The fantasy of the mother's body is frequently associated with the castration complex and a fellatio fantasy. In the mother's womb the father thrusts his penis into the patient's mouth; the penis is then bitten off. The frequent tongue- biting of the epileptic may often be traced back to this fantasy. This active castration impulse is changed through the evil con- science (talion) into a pathological castration fear. One finds with the uterine fantasies also typical spermatozoa dreams (regression to the father's body). Still, this latter type of dream is rare and is found in certain types that have medical knowledge at their disposal. 6. The epileptic experiences his own death. Th is seizure has apparently only a progressive tendency. But we find by more thorough analysis that the patient permits only his actual person:ility to die and passes through a regres- THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 363 sion to childhood or to prehistoric periods. He identifies him- self with his father or his mother. (In the case of the man who experienced his mother's hanging, this identification is very striking.) He fulfills the infantile fantasy of being his own father. He is endowed with marvelous powers and has begotten himself. The first attack is often associated with the sight of a dead person. (For example, he saw his father upon the deathbed and felt a malicious joy. The identification was then brought about as a punishment, which at the same time represented a wish-fulfillment.) This type corresponds in part to those mechanisms which Kretschmer has called the ''death-posture reflex." There are persons who are in permanent conflict with suicidal ideas, occupy themselves very much with the theme of death. This suicide is frequently a talion for the wish to kill another or to see him dead. (The man who hangs himself in his seizure also belongs in this category.) The analysis becomes more complicated because the epileptic acts two parts : that of being killed and of dying. He is the other person and also the ego. (One sees continually that the categories merge into one an- other and that this presentation of the theme is to be taken didactically.) Connected with dying are often visions of the Last Judgment, paradise, hell, which appear clearly in post- epileptic delirium. 7. The epileptic commits a forbidden sexual act. A large number of the hysterical seizures belong here. The coitus fantasy is a forbidden act to chaste maidens. Normal coitus may be experienced in the convulsion. Much more fre- quent, however, are paraphiliac acts: cunnilingus, homosexual scenes, especially incest, active and passive scenes of rape, orgies, zoophiliac scenes, and so on. Many of these fantasies are sadistically colored, so that through them we arrive at the next category, which I consider the most important, and which I have described in my first publication. 8. The epileptic commits a crime in his seizure. The greatest regression takes place in these cases. The patient sinks to the standpoint of ''primitive man." One may assume this regression to go back many thousands of years and to remove all the inhibitions of civilization. 364 SADISM AND MASOCHISM The most fearful sadistic paraphilias belong to this cate- gory: vampirism, necrophilia, cannibalism, lust murder, the sadistic frenzy for blood that manifests itself in mass murders. These sanguinary tendencies frequently are clearly expressed upon the patient's own body. Thus I do not regard tongue- biting as accidental, but as the desire to bite and suck blood. The convulsive clenching of the fists often expresses the im- pulse to strangle. There are those cases which we have just mentioned that become cyanotic because they press the tongue like a wedge against the gums. This sadistic impulse shines very clearly out of the next case : Case Number 54. A physician thirty-one years of age, married six months ago, suffers severe attacks of rage, which appear only in the presence of those whom he loves. (The only exceptions were the storming assaults in the war, which twice precipitated the same outbreaks.) After the attacks, which often last two hours, there is total amnesia for what has happened during the seizure. The seizure was described to me by his wife as follows: The mo- tive was apparently a slight one. Previous history : The patient's mother opposed his marriage. The wife had to obtain a divorce before she could marry the patient. She sometimes sees her former husband because her child was granted to him. The pa- tient is as he believes not jealous. There are differences between the wife and mother, although the parents finally adapted them- selves and acknowledged the marriage. Now the scene : The wife made a remark about the pudding the mother had made and which did not taste right to her. The pa- tient began to roll his eyes. He rushed upon her with his hands clenched and began to revile her : "You lewd woman ! You com- mon whore, you! You good-for-nothing, miserable woman!" Then he forced her into a chair and remained by her threatening with balled fists. "Do not move or I will throttle you !" Both of them continued in this horrible situation for an hour without mov- ing. Then the wife observed that her husband was exhausted. She arose and threw him upon the sofa which stood near. He lay there for an hour quietly, his eyes wide open, but with his hands no longer clenched. After an hour he came to himself. He rubbed his eyes and yawned. He asked in surprise: "What did I say?" ; t THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 365 He listened in astonishment to her description. She dared not tell him the whole story. To him it was as if she were relating the experience of some one else. He is otherwise exceedingly gentle and mild, very fond of his wife. He is just as devoted to his mother. There were formerly differences with his father. Now his father is suffering from arteriosclerosis, and he is afraid to excite him. He might have a stroke. He has never had a seizure in his father's presence. The father knows nothing of his illness. But he has had attacks fre- quently when with his mother. He finds himself evidently in an excess of affectivity. This case brought me the solution of the affectivity which was its cause. Jelliffe and White have pointed out that in such patients the energy is heaped up, suddenly to find its discharge. We do not need the energy hypothesis to explain these occurrences. The patients are apparently individuals with lesser affectivity, mild and kind. But within they have a strong resentment [''ressentiment"] ; the affects are blocked. Then a discharge of affect takes place, an explosion. The apparent indifference and absence of affect arises from the fact that the patient explodes only if his specific complex is touched. The kindling spark may be a quite insignificant matter, as the pudding in the case before us. But the criticism of the food touched the important mother complex. It was a criti- cism of the mother. The differences between mother and wife were the reflection of his internal conflict. Fixed upon his mother, he attempted to transfer his sexuality to the wife, whom he had married because — not although — she was a mother; the specific condition of love was that he had taken her from some other man (father imago). But inwardly the conflict was not settled. It was a further burden that because of shortage of housing he had to continue living in close quarters with his parents. He rejected sharply and harshly many of his mother's words that contained criticism of his wife, but they remained within him and produced their effect there. To this was added the sadistic basis of his character. Although he was a medical student, he enlisted with the combatant troops. This was not enough. He volunteered for the assaulting troops, those exposed to the greatest danger. He twice had the same seizure in the field. He no longer remembers what occurred in the charge. The affective furor was too great. Had he killed men, strangled the enemy, satisfied his thirst for blood ? He does not know. He came to himself some hours after 366 SADISM AND MASOCHISM the assault. He does not remember to have killed a man in the field. But he did not ask those under him what he had done. He was evidently afraid to learn the truth. He put himself at last in my care because he feared that some- time he might commit a crime in his seizure. He did not know that it was a matter of an "epileptic equivalent," as in those whom Cestan describes: "Persons who unexpectedly are guilty of a mis- demeanor and only at times are eccentric, immoral, extravagant, or criminal, and at the same time completely absent-minded." Here the epileptic crime approaches the obsessive actions of exhibition- ism, fetishism, and kleptomania, except that in these cases it is only most rarely that there is so complete an amnesia. The affective frenzy and the impulse are common to both forms.^^ Magnan reports the case of a young woman who put her bed in order as soon as she was overtaken by the epileptic giddiness. She laid the pillows to one side, her child to the other. With- out thinking, she piled the pillows upon the child so that it was smothered. Analysis has discovered the psychogenesis of this giddiness. It is the threatening breaking through of the ''second ego" ; it is the sense of being immersed in one's own unconscious. We must assume that this mother was bipolar in her attitude to- ward her own child, with love and hate, and that her ''second ego" wanted to murder it. We herewith approach the states which have found their best expression in the frightful running amuck (amok) of the Malays. Tropical madness and prison madness are similar conditions. Fachet has described the state as "manie furieuse." The patient is in the greatest excitement; he screams, reviles, tears and smashes everything within reach ; rushes upon his unfortunate victim; is the prey of fearful hallucinations, which set free horrible acts of vandalism and cruelty; while in his excitement his temperature rises to 39°-40°, the tongue becomes dry and fissured. This furor may last hours or days. The patient grows quiet, but his mind continues befogged for some time. Afterward, total amnesia for everything that occurred during the attack. In these cases the conscious moral ego is overpowered by the criminal impulse. The epileptic symptom complex is to be THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 367 considered solely as a self-protective mechanism. The patient collapses in order not to have to commit a crime. The self- defense does not function in these cases. The affective frenzy sets in before the moral ego can bring about the fall. The following case of Magnan is characteristic. An epileptic, whose illness was not recognized in spite of frequent absences and attacks of giddiness (once he awoke on the floor, a glass of milk spilled — without being able to re- member a seizure!), ate his supper with a good appetite but rather strange behavior. He lay down in bed with a comrade. Suddenly he arose and killed his friend. He was found in his nightshirt declaiming, gesticulating, singing psalms, repeating disconnected scraps of Latin. He comes to the hospital and re- mains there ten days in this maniacal state. At times he is in mortal terror; he is heard weeping and then repeating in unc- tions tone : ''Misericordia regnus deus salvatos meos et dignos meos." Awakening after five days more with total amnesia. This mixture of religiousness and criminality will be found in many cases. The patient uses religion as a protection against his evil **id." His struggle against the evil began even in his early childhood. The religious inhibitions were strength- ened. Later he made attempts many times to free himself from them. These patients sometimes become freethinkers or they remain very religious. Their mildness and kindness is remarkable, the overcompensation of their original sadism. Numerous observers confirm these facts. Trousseau reports the case of a young girl, extremely gentle and docile, who came under his observation. (The girl often had as many as a hundred attacks of petit mal in twenty-four hours. ) She passed the first night in a separate room under the eye of a very intelligent and devoted nurse. In the middle of the night the nurse awoke under the blows of the patient. In a half a minute the attack was over and the occurrence for- gotten. The following case of Trousseau has great similarity with my case : Case Number 55. The situation concerns a couple recently married. The wife reports that she avv^oke one night hearing pe- 368 SADISM AND MASOCHISM culiar movements on the part of her husband such as she had not heard before. He struck her with terrible force. Fortunately she was able to ring, and a servant hastening in saved her from the terrifying situation. The scene was repeated a second time. She was able to save herself in time from her husband's violence. The patient knew nothing of his attacks, but said that he had suf- fered for years from attacks of dizziness. Epileptic crimes are characterized by special brutality. A man of thirty-eight, gentle, kind-hearted, and charming in disposition, manifested a deep love toward his wife. One day — without any particular occasion — he killed her in the most hor- rible manner, throwing himself upon his victim. He smashed in her skull, her ribs, cooked her liver and other viscera. After the deed had been committed, he went to bed and slept pro- foundly and quietly. All memory of the crime was gone when he awoke (Kowalewsky). We see here the plain outbreak of cannibalism, which we can so often demonstrate in the fantasies and dreams of epileptics. Fortunately, such deeds are rare and the moral ego sets itself energetically in defense against the ''sadistic id." An epileptic peasant who had horrible murder impulses during his seizures was aware of their approach and begged to be bound before they occurred. "When they seize me, I must kill, choke, even if I see a child before me. . . . Save yourself, mother, or I shall have to strangle you!" ("Ma mere, sauve-toi ou il faut que je t'etouffe.") This patient has the impulse in full consciousness ; he knows that he might commit a criminal action; he feels himself guilty. As soon as he is free he is overjoyed that he has done nothing. This condition lasted two years. He had previously had seiz- ures in which he fell to the ground (M. Ardin-Delteil).^° We find here the defense function of the attack lasting for two years. But then for some reason the beneficent mechanism fails and the impulse appears openly. One is reminded of the frequent cases of obsessive parapathy (compulsion neurosis) in which murderous impulses appear in the open. The patients consult the physician because they are afraid they might commit crime. I have seen men that had THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 369 impulses of murder toward their wives, mothers who felt them toward their children, sons toward their parents, and all wanted to assure themselves in every possible way against these criminal tendencies. In no case have I seen such an obsessive parapathy pass over into the epileptic symptom complex. It seems as if the obsessive parapathy affords sufficient security against the crime. Janet reports from his rich experience that he has ob- served hundreds of such obsessive parapathics. Actual crime never resulted. I can only confirm such an observation. I have now and then found that the patient seemed to be about to do something. In most cases the patients protect themselves. The mother who is afraid of stabbing her child will have no knife in the house, no sharp-pointed object; she will not stay alone with her child ; and so on.^^ It is quite different with the epileptic. He passes through crime like the obsessive parapathic; the obsessive parapathic in a daydream, the epileptic in a seizure. Compulsive para- pathics very rarely dream of their impulse. In the epileptic we find in the dreams countless allusions to his desire and some- times also the representation of his specific fantasy. The epi- leptic, too, is driven by an unknown force to confession, but he never speaks so candidly as the obsessive parapathic. The case which we have just mentioned, that of the peasant (M. Ardin- Delteil) is an exception. If the epileptic is a writer, a Flaubert or a Dostoevski, he will betray his sadism in his works. Flaubert is the author of a sadistically colored novel Salamho ; Dostoevski could not write enough sadistic descriptions, so that even his biographer Mereschkovsky refers to his sadomasochistic complex. There are numerous portrayals of epileptics in his writings. I have always suspected that with Dostoevski it was a matter of a lust murder or the violation of a child. The long-suppressed but now-published chapter from the Demons confirms my as- sumption. One finds there the realistic description of the rape of a child, who after the act hangs herself (that is, the viola- tion and strangling complex). It is also significant that the plan of an unwritten novel now published bears the character- istic title: Confessions of a Great Sinner. The sadistic com- plex pressed for artistic sublimation and release. . . . 370 SADISM AND MASOCHISM I have already mentioned that the seizure reveals an ex- traordinary work of condensation. It is manifold in its deter- mination. The motives mentioned are often present in num- bers. One will always come in the epileptic upon fundamental sadistic traits, which have never been absent in any case of my observation. If one thinks of the great number of epileptics (the num- ber in America is estimated as over 100,000), considers their tendency to deterioration, the powerlessness of therapy hith- erto, takes into account, furthermore, that they are asocial, be- come a burden to the state or the family, then every attempt to cure this dreadful disease, this fearful scourge of mankind should be greeted with thanksgiving.^^ Treatment must have two directions: i. reeducation for work; 2. analysis. The two go hand in hand ! The analysis begins with the regulation of the patient's life. I have already stated that all medication has to stop. Many patients swear by some quack medicine (epileptol and the like) and believe that they cannot get along without it. But it is a requirement that I make unconditionally. The patient must recognize the power and the significance of the psychic forces. Then the matter of sleep is regulated. Seven, at the most eight, hours may be permitted. The less the epileptic sleeps, the more quickly will he be withdrawn from his alluring fantasies and daydreams, his '^unconscious ego." Many of these patients sleep late in the morning, lie for hours in bed, often a whole day after an attack, in order to rest thoroughly. The patient must renounce this pleasurable by-premium. The patients are often ready to do this, but the treatment is made difficult through the environment. The mother secretly administers the bromide or she will not let the patient get up; she persuades him to continue his afternoon nap, and so on. The most important regulation: the patient must be occu- pied and diverted from his own ego. What he does is at first a secondary matter. If he only does something that interests him. Women must be engaged in their housework, go shop- ping, must learn again to gather interests. I have men take some course, typewriting, stenography, languages, work in the THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 371 garden, whatever is best; they come after a time to look around again for some means of liveHhood. Pierce Clark has demonstrated that the epileptic takes refuge in his seizures when he feels himself inadequate for his life tasks or considers his occupation as humiliating. It is the duty of the psychotherapist to remove as far as possible the injuriousness of the environment and set patients on the way to work ; best, to the work that interests them and in which they take delight. It is already a great step in advance when the patient recognizes his distaste for work and takes the trouble to overcome this. If the epileptic has been brought to occupation and no longer to make this illusory through the seizures, a great portion of the education has been accomplished, in which, to be sure, *'the fear of the seizure" has to be constantly combated. This is where the most severe conflicts with the environment are waged. The physician must remain implacable. This in- dependence may proceed in severe cases step by step. The epileptic may go alone first for a small stretch in places that are not dangerous (garden, meadow, and so on), to advance then gradually to greater adventures. He must also take pleasure in his work and in his progress. He must feel that he is chang- ing from a useless burden into a social being. The sense of inferiority always present, which springs from the self-knowl- edge of the wicked "id," must be destroyed by the analysis, the patient again and again be helped up when he loses hope. The characteristic thing about these patients is that they do not believe that they can be cured and are always repeating : 'T am a lost soul ! There is nothing that can help me 1" The will to be sick is hiding behind this hopelessness. This will to be sick can be recognized and conquered only through analysis. This analysis is one of the severest tasks of the psychiatrist. One must think that the patients are in part fighting against their ability to remember, in part repeating after a few meager facts : 'T have told you everything! What can I say more?" In many the resistance sets in at once and after their first scanty report of their life history they say not another word. One must not in such cases lose patience, even if the defiance 372 SADISM AND MASOCHISM and silence last for weeks. Dr. Graven has often with super- human endurance passed through the zones of silence and come at last to the goal. Suddenly the patient opens up. It is chiefly the patient's distrust that stands in the way of the analysis. The epileptic is afraid on the one hand of the truth itself, on the other hand he is afraid that the analyst may be- tray his fantasies. He must therefore be absolutely confident that the physician will tell neither his family nor any one else anything of his confessions. This distrust and the resistance increase after a visit from the mother or the brother, especially if the physician confers with these persons in the patient's ab- sence. It would indeed be best to break off all relations with the family, if the analysis did not also include education of the family as to the correct treatment of the patient. It is advis- able to employ an intermediate person — the family physician — whereby it must always be considered that the patient regards with a suspicious eye every connection. The treatment is frequently a permanent struggle. The strong readiness to hate on the part of the patient is manifested also toward the doctor, if the patient feels that he is slighted. He looks upon the interruption of the "cure" through the Sunday holiday as want of consideration and usually reacts on Sunday or Monday with one or more seizures, which are to convince the family that he is incurable and the treatment is utterly worthless. Attacks are arranged also in the physician's home, upon the stairs, in order to bring the doctor's heartless- ness before his eyes. At last the resistances are surmounted and the patient learns to know himself and gives up his own reactions and arrange- ments. If he has come to take pleasure in his work, learned to do without bromide and luminal, to go out alone, the seizures become more and more rare. Then with every new attack one may study the cause and the specific form of the patient's reac- tion. The patient must recognize that he has put himself into the affective frenzy through the ''pumping up of affect." Small occasions are utilized to think himself into anger or into an intolerable situation. Finally the impulses pri'se which do not bear the light of consciousness. THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 373 It cannot be determined for the time being how far the cure will be able to go. We have to study this problem through a large amount of material. One thing is certain : even in organ- ically conditioned cases the parapathic superstructure may be broken down through reeducation and analysis and the indi- vidual made social, in so far as we are not dealing with an organic disease with progressive tendency (neoplasm, tumor, and the like). In many cases there has been organic disease which has been long since cured; upon this basis have been erected the para- pathic superstructure, the fear of the seizure, the daydreams, the infantilism, and so on. I recall how Dr. Graven, in a case in which there was a central auditory defect on one side, came to me in fright one day after an eight-week analysis : ''The patient had an attack to-day while with me. I discovered a positive Babinski!" Were eight weeks of treatment to be lost? I ad- vised that the treatment should be continued. And, lo! the result was remarkable. The young man formerly afraid to work, embittered, who had been having one to three seizures almost every day, despite narcotics, who could not think, is working in a business house; he goes out alone; is studying languages ; his interest is alert ; and he has one attack in a period of from four to six weeks, a very light one and one which leaves no consequences of any importance. Dr. Graven has reported his analytic experiences in a very interesting work. Case Number 2 of the nine cases which he treated is particularly worthy of remark. The patient comes from an epileptic fam- ily; three brothers are epileptic; two are in hospitals for the incurable, incapable of work. Complete cure after three weeks of analysis.^^ Such results after brief treatment are not rare, One can achieve rapid success, especially in fresh cases of late epilepsy. One must reckon on the average upon two or three months, in very stubborn cases upon a half a year. The change in behavior after analysis is so startling and striking that even the laity and finally the family have to admit it. In some cases there is complete cessation of the seizures. In others the attacks become rudimentary. They last a few seconds; they bear the stamp, but are not actual at' tacks, or they appear only at very long intervals. SADISM AND MASOCHISM It is possible, however, in all cases to remove the dreadful progressive tendency of the disease to deterioriation and to inaugurate the process of recovery. Analysis can in this manner help to solve the serious prob- lem of epilepsy. I am not in favor of having epileptics assem- bled in an institute of their own. The danger of psychic infection is too great. The impulse to imitation is especially strong in epileptics. The only advantage is that they can be kept employed. Of course an attempt should be made to analyze the cases which are in institutions and restore them to life. A large staff of trained analysts is necessary for this. The successful analysis of an epileptic is a masterpiece. It requires a peculiar technic and great intuition. Any one who has been occupied with these patients for any length of time will be able to acquire the necessary experience and will learn to take into consideration the special peculiarities of these patients. I will summarize my experience : Many cases of epilepsy may be cured by analysis, many improved. The so-called epileptic character is the character of the parapathic. There is no epi- lepsy without epileptic seizures. The epileptic seizure occupies the central position in the epileptic symptom complex. This attack is in many cases psychically conditioned. Only analysis can lay bare the psychic motives of the seizure. It must be con- sidered, however, that this analysis is exceedingly difficult. There must be regard for the characterology of the epileptic. Although there is no distinct epileptic character, yet the so- called epileptic manifests certain characters of the parapathic in a greater degree: he is distrustful, egoistic, very sly, conceals his cunning behind simplicity as he hides his pathological sensitiveness and affectivity behind good nature and childlike- ness. He is a strong hater and is very envious and liable at all times to transfer this hatred to the environment and upon the analyst. Trivial occasions suffice to precipitate an attack. The first task of the psychotherapist is to seek out the slight occa- sions and demonstrate their associative connection with the predominant complex. The defiant attitude toward the world and the family, in the transferred sense toward religion and all authority, is the most difficult thing to discover. Analysis THE EPILEPTIC SYMPTOM COMPLEX 375 usually begins with an attitude of defiance. This makes of the analysis a continuous struggle, which, to be sure, the patient may not consciously recognize as such. The results are at- tained step by step. Relapses are due to offended self-love. The analysis becomes more and more psychopedagogy and means a complete reeducation of the patient. In this sense I must agree with Jelliffe and White, who designate epilepsy as a "life reaction." It is a pathological reaction to life and makes use of the regression to hinder all progress with one single exception: the progress of the disease. If this pathological progression is changed into a healthy one, this means, if the psychic energies are no longer used for the destruction of the personality but for their upbuilding, then analysis has fulfilled its purpose." XIX ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY The mind of man and the course of the world are so alike under all circumstances and at all times that seldom is a truth entirely new and rarely a new thing wholly true. Grillparzer. In my first writing on epilepsy I briefly reported a case the sadistic roots of which came clearly to light. I should like to enter more fully now into this case. I will first repeat that part of the history which may be found in the first volume of this present work. Case Number 56. Mr. Lamda came to me for treatment four years ago, not because of his epileptic seizures, but because of a paraphilia that had already brought him several times into disa- greeable situations. He was a urolagnist, in whom the impulse to urolagnia appeared in the following manner. He would try to slip into a woman's toilet room or from a man's room observe the urination of women. He felt even in this act of observation a strong libido, which forced him to onanism or manifested itself in ejaculation. He also tried to force his way into the woman's urinal and then if any of the urine remained in the toilet bowl he would drink it, dipping it out with his hand, with the greatest feelings of pleasure. He experienced another gratification of his paraphilia by waiting behind bushes until some woman passing would there attend to her needs. He would then rush to the spot, lick up the excretion with his tongue, and had particularly a volup- tuous sensation if some earth remained between his teeth so that they grated upon it. (It is remarked in passing: Mr. Lamda stated that he noticed with regret that he had a number of rivals like-minded, who knew one another very well.) Before treatment he was impotent toward woman, always requested urination of prostitutes, but only in the rarest instances tasted their urine. He had a feeling of disgust for bloody urine. This patient suffered 376 ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY 377 severe attacks, which appeared chiefly at night. According to his father's description they took place in the following manner : He would utter a piercing cry and begin to strike about fear- fully with hands and feet. A twilight state lasting several days would then often succeed the convulsion; I frequently observed this in the patient. He gave the impression of one slightly in- toxicated and always betrayed a leaning toward a certain year of his childhood. It was not the same each time, but the period be- tween eleven and fourteen years was always reproduced in the dazed condition. The diagnosis "epilepsy" had been made concerning this patient by different approved psychiatrists. He was in such a reduced condition through large doses of bromide when he came to me for treatment that he was almost incapable of any work. Psychoanalysis produced at the beginning an almost magical effect. I attributed this brilliant result not only to the psychic disburdening, but also to the freedom from bromide. His acne disappeared; his appetite improved; he began to appear flourish- ing ; and his quiet, sedate manner impressed every one. It is im- possible for me to give here the whole analysis. One thing re- vealed itself with certainty, that he was perhaps the greatest sadist that I had ever had occasion to meet in my analytic practice. He reveled in sanguinary fantasies sadistic in content, which, as is always the case in such persons, alternated with masochistic ideas of being bound, beaten, tortured, burned. I considered the situation before treatment after this manner: Inasmuch as the paraphilia had progressed so far, a much more serious crime, a much stronger paraphilia, had to be carried out in the seizure, if it was a matter of repressed impulses. In other words, the paraphilia of the urolagnia had developed as an offshoot of a much stronger pathogenic complex ; the breaking through of the entire complex created an attack, since the complex was re- jected by consciousness. I will attempt to give the most important results of the analysis, as they came to light in the course of the treatment. It was clear to me that the patient performed in the drinking of the urine some symbolic action, the meaning of which must be discovered. He begins his communications as follows : *'I have a frightful loathing of perspiring women. I can scarcely remain in the neighborhood of a sweating woman." Here he misspeaks and says "slimy women" instead of "sweating women." 378 SADISM AND MASOCHISM It seems therefore that sweat and slime * have certain connec- tions which do not appear until later. His next association is : **I feel disgust also before a slimy vulva. A woman who is hav- ing her period is a horror to me. I can never drink the urine of a woman if it is bloody. My mouth puckers with disgust." We already see one line between sweat, mucus, blood. ... I have called attention in The Language of the Dream to the sig- nificance of the symbolic equations. All excretions stand for one another in the dream. The paraphilia seems therefore particularly to be related to the drinking of blood. . . . His earliest memories are interesting. The first goes back to the period between his second and third years and reads : I was in the care of some person or other awaiting the return of my parents, who were at a fair. I had at that time clay toys, a doll of clay, a clay hare, with which I was playing. I was angry and broke all my toys. . . . The first memory shows the child's strong destructive instinct. Even at two years old the child is playing the killing of animals. For all these destructive tendencies of the child betray his latent cruelty. The cause of the anger may have been the absence of the parents. The second memory goes still further back. He con- siders it the very earliest : I was lying between my parents and wanted to urinate. My father set me upon the pot, the edge of which was a little rough. I cried, and my father was afraid I had been hurt. He woke my mother and reproached her so severely that she wept. The second memory shows us the relation of urination to the parents. He believes that he remembers dimly that he had cut himself behind and that this was the reason his father was so vexed. A further memory from the fourth year, which brings before us the first sexual impulse of Mr. Lamda. The maid hid me under her skirt so that I had my head between her legs. Also somewhat later : I am playing under a rattan chair. The maid is sitting in the chair. 1 feel a wetness and accuse the maid of having urinated over me. Most of his next recollections have to do with urine. It is not therefore to be wondered at that he wet his bed until the tenth year. * Schleim = slime, mucus (Translator). ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY 379 Even yet in his attacks he wets his bed, which is very disagreeable to him, for he is fearfidly ashamed before his family. He is often in despair on this account and struggles with suicidal ideas. What he would like best is to be shot by a woman. He has often played with a revolver and was always thinking of a "water shot" into his mouth. He sticks everything into his mouth. He has the bad habit of sucking everything, lead pencils, pens, cigars, and so on. His first dream during treatment is important : I picked up a girl of our acquaintance as if I were going to carry her. I was very much excited in doing so and felt great pleasure. I kissed her, sucking upon the mouth. I awoke with violent beating of the heart. A similar dream recurs often: He is floating in the air and sucking at the breast of a female being. It is as if he had wings. It occurs to him with the dream that he often carried his sister about. He remembers clearly how the birth of this sister was told to him when he was three. Sucking has always played a great role with him. As a child he was afraid of vampires, which come in the night and suck out the blood. The meaning of both dreams : He is a vampire that sucks the blood from his sister. Blows from his mother gave him sensations of pleasure. He fantasies situations in which he is struck by women. At the age of four he found a stone in the garden that was divided in the middle and looked like the buttocks. He carried it around with him many months and often looked at it. A short time after this he had a remarkable experience. He saw a lovely girl and was so fascinated that he could not say a word and only gaped at her. At six years he was in love with his governess. Somewhat less innocent was the next occurrence of which he has preserved the memory. His two sisters, his brother, and he were playing doctor. They stuck a spraying apparatus into the younger sister's anus and blew air in until she screamed. Then they laughed immoderately when the air was blown out with a loud noise. He played a great deal in his seventh year — he was in the country — with two girls. They touched the sexual parts and urinated before one another. The next winter the brother, be- cause the patient had struck him, told the mother about all this play. The mother was very angry; he was beaten, which again gave him great satisfaction. He was very timid especially before going to sleep. He was afraid to get up again, fretted for his parents, and refused to go SADISM AND MASOCHISM to sleep because of his fear. He could be quieted only with difficulty. He liked to watch girls urinating, even at the age of seven. He showed the girls who wanted some baked cakes that he had, his hinder parts and said : ''Here are the best cakes. . . /' He performed his first urolagnistic act at the age of eight. He became enamored of a very beautiful boy. He saw him urinating in a meadow and licked up his urine. Suddenly another thought comes to him. They often secretly caroused together in the gymnasium. When in their songs the question came to him, "Brother, what's your sweetheart called?" he always gave — his mother's first name. A religious period of extraordinary intensity begins in the eleventh year.^ That is comprehensible when one knows that the intermediate school in which he was trained was a religious one under the supervision of priests. This religious period lasted until the fourteenth year and changed apparently without motiva- tion into an anticlerical one. But we shall see that in this case, too, the inner religious current is of great significance. Religious mo- tives were always mixed with erotic ones. Thus at the time of his piety (thirteenth year) his favorite fantasy was: He imagined a chaste, very devout vestal, who must be a virgin. He adored her in such a manner that he allowed her to urinate into his mouth. This identification with the chamber returns in many of his fantasies. He is either a closet or a chamber pot. It is the old infantile envy of the objects which may see everything. He wished also to be a flea or another tiny insect ; he would have liked to have the Tarnkappe so that he could in this way observe the various phases of defecation, urination, and coitus. He is a voyeur of the first degree, and even looking at urination affords him a great sense of pleasure. He has a particularly strong increase of libido if he is afraid of being seen or caught. Seeing and being seen have great signifi- cance for him. He can masturbate with the fear of being caught at it. He had a pollution even at twelve years of age at a school task in which he feared he was not prepared. He began to masturbate at seventeen and defended himself in vain against onanism. He would succumb almost every time. He suffered headaches and various gastric disturbances, which seem to go back to an aerophagy. A doctor whom he consulted advised him to give up onanism and go to women. He tried coitus the first time with a prostitute at eighteen. The erection came with ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY 381 difficulty; he had no particular libido, felt a great loathing. A memory occurred to him at the time, which he could not tell me until to-day. It ostensibly goes back to his second year : I was standing by a gatelike bridge of a city wall, and held by the maid I looked down upon a great surface of water (Danube?). Upon the water was the head of a person drowning, who was calling for help. I asked what was the matter with the man and the girl said: *'He is drowning!" We may consider this memory an autosymbolic representation of his internal struggle. He is in danger of drowning! The servant girl represents in his dreams always the pure Maid of Heaven, Mary. He is in danger of perishing, and only Mary can save him. He manifests a great devotion to Mary, which is still to be discussed.^ The conflict between sensuality and piety continues to rage with undiminished force. At eighteen he fell in love with a boy whom he saw naked in the swimming school. He repeatedly had the desire to perform fellatio upon him, but dared not propose it to him. The rectum claims his attention a great deal. There is always an itching at the anus so that he has to stick objects into it. Perineal cramps occurred when he was nineteen, which were frightful. They were bound with feelings of anxiety, for he be- lieved he had cancer of the rectum. He became hypochondriacal, suffered undefined feelings of fear in the evening, and separated himself from others. He was already a recluse at twenty, avoid- ing the society of his friends. At nineteen he tasted his own urine for the first time. It was not unpleasant, but caused him violent beating of the heart. He did not begin drinking women's urine until later. The urine of his own family, however, disgusted him. His trouble became worse and worse. He sneaked about in all the public toilet rooms, tried to observe the women, then dipped a cloth in the bowl and drank the urine. . . . He has wished since he was fourteen — he recalls it now — that boys of whom he was fond would urinate into his soup. It is significant that he stuttered for a time at six years (evil conscience !). He brings various dreams which all permit me to infer a strong resistance. He falls asleep during the analysis or is overtaken by a feeling of dizziness. He comes about half an hour late. He was reading the paper in the coffeehouse and was so interested 382 SADISM AND MASOCHISM that he forgot me. He is very unwilling to separate himself from his infantilisms. He reluctantly admits his day fantasies. Yesterday he was fantasying that he was in the body of a white horse that was being ridden by a young woman he knows.^ He has often dreamed that women sit upon his breast and use him for a riding animal. He always has the feeling : "You must already have experienced that ! You must have been there before * To-day he is fantasying that at the final examination, he hands over his tasks to girls and is compelled to hide in the water-closet so that he will not be discovered. It gives him the greatest pleas- ure to think out such situations. A remarkable dream last night, which occupies itself with his paraphilia : I found myself in a wood in which there was a water-closet. Two or three girls were standing before the closet. I assumed that one girl was within and waited until she went. Then I wanted to go in and drink her urine. But I noticed that the closet widened, and lengthened through lattice bars, so that above it looked like a cage. A poorly dressed woman was working around above and outside men were watching what I was doing, so that I did not dare enter. The dream may be recognized as the direct continuance of his day fantasies. He is always in fear of the police and of being locked up, when his father would learn of his disorder. For this reason he has the constant wish that he might find a means to make himself invisible. He would also like to invent a toilet closet fitted up with reflex mirrors so that he could undisturbed observe women at urination and defecation. The dream is a uterine fantasy. He finds himself with his two sisters in the mother's body and drinks their urine. The poorly dressed woman represents the midwife, and the men are his supposed fathers. He is always imagining that the stream from the woman takes the place of the penis. The defecating woman is also the woman with the penis. He now recalls a number of scenes where a servant girl quite unceremoniously urinated or defecated before him. He was five years old at that time. An older person (he believes it might have been one of his many aunts) performed fellatio upon him at a still earlier age. He often went at six years old into the drawing-room and imagined that Satan was there, against whom he must defend ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY 383 nis whole family. He did this with ejaculatory prayers and was glad that all his prayers were so effective. . . . The next dream again has to do with an infantile situation and shows that everything concerns seeing and not being seen. I am in a room where there is a sofa that cannot be seen because of a board wall. One of my sisters goes behind this board wall to urinate, while the other, clothed only in her chemise, urinates from a crib (the bed changes into a sort of sandy surface). I see her before and behind quite naked and ask her if this does not annoy her, at which she answers : "It makes no difference to me." This dream helps us explain what has gone before. The cage is the crib, an important memory of childhood. The dream re- produces the scenes from childhood. The sandy surface arises from the fact that he often has to "enjoy" the urine mixed with sand or earth, when the crunching upon the sand adds a great deal to the pleasure. The connection of his paraphilia with the sister complex becomes ever clearer. I will interrupt the report of the sessions. The dreams treat typically of the same constellation. The resistances increase. New seizures are constantly taking place, which keep him weeks from the analysis. Some significant dreams stand out from this difficult period. One of them is : I was on my way to a certain narrow street with my uncle. To shorten the way we passed a number of houses with thoroughfares, which I still do not recognize, and in this manner reached our de- sired goal with astonishing quickness ; this, as already mentioned, was a narrow street and crooked, which, however, seemed very familiar to me. Without any transition we were in a sort of crowded quarter. In these alcovelike spaces, which, as stated, communicated, because there were no walls between, lay on plank beds in a long row a number of sleeping men, all in ragged clothes. The entire space was brightly lighted. I was rather troubled at the sight for I noticed no person in charge (no watchman or the like) and we, that is, my uncle and I, were in better clothing, so that I was afraid that something might easily happen to us in such company ; and at the same time the fact that we were visiting this locality merely out of curiosity might in itself rouse the anger of these people. But my uncle led me on. At the end of the row of sleeping men, there lay by himself upon a plank a somewhat •384 SADISM AND MASOCHISM better-dressed man, who fixed my uncle with a hostile look and said to him : "Ah, you are an assassin." * Quite at the end of the passage was the closet, consisting of two places. It was built into a semicircular arch; the intervening wall which separated the two places, as well as the doors, was of wood. My uncle opened one of these doors and showed me the closet, making at the same time some remark relating to the latter, which I do not any longer remember (I believe he spoke of two pots or potties). I answered: ''Yes, I believe that, if two wanted at the same time. . . ." Here I broke off the sentence. The closet which I saw was made of strikingly white wood (the association forces itself upon me here, alabaster and alum) and was not soiled, a circumstance which seemed very remarkable considering the sur- roundings. As my uncle and I left the locality described I remembered that one of the better-dressed men — as I afterward recalled, I saw later more respectably dressed men, whose facial expressions also led one to think of better-situated persons, who therefore did not at all fit with this environment — had said to my uncle that he was an "assassin" [a "sticker"]. I asked my uncle what he could have meant by this word. He responded that that was a man who allowed himself to be influenced particularly by older women. '*So a slave to women," I answered. The latter discussion seems to me the more remarkable as even in the dream the association "de- flowerer" pressed itself upon me in connection with the word "sticker." I will pass over the interpretative possibilities, which I have indicated in the Language of the Dream, and turn to the situations that betray to us the sadistic direction of his instincts. We will consider the puzzling figure of the uncle. I first regarded it as a phallic symbol, because I did not at that time know the representation of the parapathy in the dream and its personification. The uncle is the dreamer himself, as all persons in the dream are split-off figures of the dreamer. The uncle sym- bolizes the parapathy, the illness, the criminal in him (the uncle is a butcher). The row of ragged men refers to a den of criminals or a jail. For this reason the absence of the watchman makes him uncom- fortable. The watchman symbolizes consciousness, which watches over the savage instincts and prevents them from entering daily * Stecher = sticker, slabber, assassin (Translator). ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY 385 life. He fears the anger of these ragged criminals. The ragged criminals represent his criminal thoughts. Thus they lie dormant in his psyche (functional interpretation). He fears that the anger may be stronger than his reason and his reflection (he is, signifi- cantly, a jurist!). He might be overpowered by the criminal im- pulses. And now comes the betrayal. One o£ these thoughts calls the dreamer a murderer. "Ah, you are an assassin" (a stabber) ! The white wood, alabaster, refers to a white body. It is his favorite fantasy to thrust a dagger into a white female body, white as ala- baster. The uncle then gives him the explanation for stabber in such a way that he understands it as one subject to women. We see in Lamda most beautifully how the sadist changes from fear of his violence into a masochist. When Lamda goes to a woman he humbles himself in every possible way. He has been able to convert the sadism into masochism because he symbolically subjects himself to the woman within himself. His homosexu- ality indeed plainly forces itself through in the dream and forms the basis of his scorn of women, which he then transforms into an apotheosis of woman. It is impossible for such persons to evaluate normally. They can only oscillate between the two ex- tremes, because the extremes are the bipolar modes of expression of one and the same force. Sticker, woman's slave, deflowerer, these are the most important associations which the dream binds together. The woman's slave is only the, reverse of the master of women, the man who deter- mines the life or death of a woman, who has her life in his hand. This is the murderer, who possesses her entirely and reveals him- self to her as the lord of her fate and dismembers her, as if the Devil wanted to destroy what God has so splendidly constructed. The uncle is significant, for he had conjectured in him a lover of his mother ("If two wanted at the same time. . . ."). The mother, whose body is white as alabaster, is at the same time suspected and defended. The mother (here represented as the closet) is not soiled. The father, who let pass the mother's un- faithfulness, is made the object of scorn as a slave to women. The many sleeping men in this dream are men who have slept with the mother. The next dream affords us further insight into his mental life : After various changes of scene, which I can no longer remem- ber, I found myself suddenly in a mountainous landscape, a bare stony ground, a valley, set only with scattered dwarf pines, the 386 SADISM AND MASOCHISM further horizon again bordered with bare walls of rock. A man was walking at my right, a gun in his hand (Papa?) ; before us a chamois in flight. My companion at the right took aim and fired, and although the poor beast fell by a dwarf pine after the first shot, he sent two or three more bullets after it. I saw the precise spots in the body where the different bullets had entered ; they all struck behind the left shoulder blade ; that is, the animal upon its flight, which at first had been straight ahead, probably com- pelled by the character of the ground, had taken a left direction shortly before it was hit by the first ball. We approached the dying animal, and at sight of the animal I remarked to my companion : *'I really had imagined such a hunt quite differently." The body of the chamois became while we were looking at it larger and larger, greater than that of an elephant, so that the height of the breast — I mean by that the distance from the breast bone to the spinal column — was finally as much as a meter and a half. The left side of the breast turned toward us was completely denuded of skin and ribs so that lungs, parts of the liver and of the stomach, could be seen in their correct anatomical position, but not covered with blood, not twitching, without movement or life, just as in a wax preparation for purposes of demonstration or in- struction ; nor did the individual soft parts and viscera show the warm, soft color of an animal body, but rather the glistening color of varnish of such a preparation without a correct reproduction of the actual tone; as is usual so that the preparations for teaching purposes may be readily distinguished. But beneath the lungs the whitish-yellow intestines gushed forth from the figure in serpent- like movements; yet they, too, not covered with blood, but clean and washed, as they might perhaps be used for sausage casings by a manufacturer of sausage. In this dream the wish makes itself known to see the inside of a living being. His father is in fact a passionate hunter. Here is revealed the inherited disposition to sadism. That hunting is a well-known mask for sadism has been stated so often that I need not repeat here this commonplace. One might also call hunt- ing a vent for sadism, and my analyses of hunters have always been able to confirm this for me. The chamois here symbolizes woman, whom he is forever chasing in his fantasies. His father's hunting of the chamois might give the original point of departure, to which his sadistic fantasies are then joined. We recognize his ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY 387 mother, who appears in the latter part of the dream as a female elephant. The phenomenon of growing in the dream frequently relates to a pregnancy. The gravid mother was a constant excite- ment to him. He still lives in the fear that his mother might again become pregnant. He considered his younger brothers and sisters always as troublesome rivals and occupied himself in many fantasies with their death. His relation with his younger brother at the present time is such that they never exchange a word, although they are thrown together. Not that they are officially ill-disposed to each other, but they never speak together . . . except the most necessary words and these only in the presence of the parents, who are much grieved that the brothers cannot feel kindly to each other. He is engaged with his sisters in all sorts of scuffling, which represents playful discharge and tentative preliminary attempts at murder. They wrestle in irritation with each other, then he throws them and says: "So — now you are in my power, your life hangs upon my mercy," and so on. . . . The sadistic fundamental attitude expresses itself in this play. All his dreams end in a fight in which he falls into a rage. A number of important memories ! He was five years old and was playing in the garden with a small roe, of which he was very fond. A man came and also played with the deer; suddenly he drew a knife from his pocket and stuck the animal in the breast. It was in fact the butcher, who had been commissioned to kill the deer. He then skillfully removed the viscera. Here is an event which perhaps had a very powerful influence upon him. For he is always thinking of cutting open and stabbing and is actually the typical woman murderer. He is forever run- ning away when with women for fear that he might do something. The urine takes the place of blood. He craves the blood of his feminine victims. His favorite food as a child was blood. Blood pudding or a cake made of goose's blood. A few days ago a vision of a lust murder arose when he was with a prostitute. He hastened away in horror. His evil conscience is betrayed by an- other phenomenon : fear of every watchman ! Other fantasies which appear rather plainly are those of the mother's body. He is still in his mother's body, which appears in the dreams as horse, chest, press. The absurd infantile conception of observing everything from his mother's womb recurs in day fantasies and dreams. I reproduce here some of the patients notes concerning his dream life: I found myself in a room fitted out with shabby elegance, at 388 SADISM AND MASOCHISM first clothed (with the dim memory of having entered by a dark vestibule and over a badly lighted stairway) and later without my clothing; I lay there in a bed. Two men came by with a girl from the streets and went before my eyes into a chiffonier which stood in the room, which then began a rhythmic swinging, upon which I had the feeling that coitus was going on in it. Suddenly, having had during the whole performance an oppressive and un- comfortable feeling, I looked at the sheet of the bed in which I was lying and noticed that it was soiled with blood spots dried in, as well as with some yellow slimy spots likewise already dried on ; upon which I sprang from the bed in disgust, fully dressed again, and remarked with a feeling of relief that at the same time an oldish, shabbily dressed woman (procuress? landlady?) appeared with a key, as I supposed, to liberate those who were imprisoned in the chiffonier, from whom I in my person also expected to be freed. Here the dream ended. I awoke in somewhat worse physical condition, had to suffer the whole day torpidity of the stomach and intestine and from five in the evening also occasional attacks of giddiness. I was in a bad humor and about noon, as well as toward evening, had a great inner disquietude (craving for sensation? libido?). About ten (or half past), in falHng asleep, I felt as if I had been beaten in all my limbs, which usually is the case only when I have irritated my nerves through sexual excitement for an entire afternoon and half the night. Nevertheless, I soon fell (to be sure, after onanism) into a profound refreshing sleep, from which I did not waken until seven o'clock. I dreamed again in two parts. From the first section of the dream I remember only that in the dream I was arranging and registering my own dream experience, which was again rather vague and disconnected, and that I found that the ordered dream was still so void of connection or of reason that I thought to myself that you, Doctor, would have a good laugh over it." The second part of the dream of the night had the following content : I, a journal marten, am sitting in a coffeehouse reading the Frankfurter Zeitung. Then the piccolo comes to me and asks if the journal is free and simply takes it from me without waiting for my answer and gives me the Berliner Borsenkurier ; I grow furious, call to him, call the cashier, make my complaint; the cashier drags the piccolo by the hair ; I myself sometime later fall upon the piccolo, strike him several times in the face with clenched ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY 389 fist, in which I have the feeHng that a diamond ring (although 1 have never worn such a ring — for years have worn none at all) must scratch the poor piccolo's face until the blood runs, and say to myself : **I am in a rage." (I can as little recall a corre- sponding face in the dream, that is, the torn and bleeding coun- tenance, as that I saw the public, although I had the uncomfort- able feeling of performing my heroic deed in full sight of the public. The piccolo, strange to say, offered no resistance.) Then I call for my ''bill" and explain to the cashier that I will never visit this place again. The clerk excuses the conduct of the piccolo, saying: ''Please to know that the piccolo has debts; some one else has just given him money for a drink ; and from a person who is in debt one may expect anything." Even in the dream I had then the sense of having committed an unworthy deed, one which, alas, could no longer be undone ; and I breathed freely when on awaking I recognized that it had all been only a dream. The present day has been much more favorable as to my phys- ical condition than the two preceding ones. These notes are interesting because the conditions which pre- ceded the attack are similar to those described. This time the seizure was cut short by an onanistic act. Such a listless, torpid mood usually ushers in an attack. The dreams are exceedingly interesting. The chest of drawers as symbol of the mother's body is a familiar one. It is im- portant that the dreams are constantly mentioning blood. His choice of words, even, betray the bloodsucker, the vampire. He is no reader of the papers in the cafe, but a "journal marten." The piccolo is he himself. He strikes himself because in child- hood he had burdened himself with heavy debts. The cashier in the dreams represents death demanding expiation. The drink money again betrays his paraphilia. He is a vampire and would like to drink his victim's blood. This is his trespass (debt), and for this he must pay. His hatred comes clearly into evidence in the second dream ("I am in a rage"). We see also the debasement of the mother, who is represented as a procuress. As a child he would sniff about in the linen from his parents' bed and was much excited if he dis- covered there spots of blood or mucus. He then hated his parents — particularly his mother. He is small (the piccolo) and hates all who are large, especially his brother, who is beautifully formed. The chest symbolizes also brain case — the parapathy. The SADISM AND MASOCHISM mother should save him from his illness. The idea has become fixed in his brain that his mother has two men. The second is the uncle, who plays so important a part in the dream of the assassin (page 383). Has he observed coitus between his mother and uncle? Some significant memories. At five he liked a picture in his picture book: a boy overeats with some French rolls so that his belly bursts. This fear that his belly might burst recurred again and again, the last time when he was twenty. We already know that the fear is the penalty for wanting to open the belly of others. He is indeed Jack the Ripper. Dreams of fire and fear of burning are frequent. He inflicted burns upon himself at the age of fourteen, presumably to punish himself and to die a martyr's death. He dreams that his mother calls him and takes him with her in her bed. In another dream he tears himself from a poorly dressed woman, whose face is still youthful, oval, pale, but otherwise without expression, who betrays in appearance and gesture a bold familiar- ity. He struggles with her and succeeds in escaping her clutches and embraces. Every struggle in the dream is also a conflict with himself. We observe how masculine and feminine tendencies are at war in the dreamer. He wants to free himself from his femininity ('T have torn myself loose from her") and he is furious that he cannot be a complete man. To be a man means for him to be a sadist and to kill the woman ! For this reason he has to flee into his femininity in order to secure himself against the crime. I will pass over the other meanings of the dream. They would carry us too far from our theme. . . . But who is this "poorly dressed woman, whose face is still youth- ful, oval, pale, but otherwise without expression, who betrays in appearance and gesture a bold familiarity"? Only one who is familiar with the deeper religious symbolism in dreams will rec- ognize behind this the Virgin Mary, who warns him against crime, guards him from committing incest upon his sister or from murder. And deeper still, his mother is concealed behind the picture, which unites in one image the prostitute and the Blessed Virgin. He is outwardly an atheist, like all sadists, and inwardly a devout person. He attends church to delight himself in the music ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY 391 or to ridicule the pious people. He would much rather blaspheme in the churches or seek there some erotic adventure. But his strict rearing in regard to the Church — he was a pupil at a Jesuit institution — had entered his marrow. Much might be related of the connection between sadism and blasphemy. The reading of the works of Marquis de Sade, particularly of Justine, teaches one plainly enough. There is portrayed the Devil's Mass, there is set forth the stupidity of those who let priests lead them around by the nose. Hatred toward woman is at the same time hatred toward the Deity. In woman, faith is put to the torture and vanquished. But only apparently. The religious feelings of guilt continually reappear and demand the transformation of sadism into masochism. Masochism is submission to the woman and to religion. If one wants to know the day fantasies of such a patient, it is a good thing to have him construct an "artificial" dream. This request must be made of him unexpectedly, so that the patient cannot prepare himself and build up a falsified dream which con- ceals from the physician the most important matter. I have re- peatedly made such experiments and have reported them in the chapter "Factitious Dreams" in my work The Language of the Dream. Lamda was asked one day to give me such a dream and rattled off a day fantasy. For he spoke so very rapidly that I could hardly follow him. Here is the product, which we will now put under the psy- chologist's lens : I see a faience bowl, which changes to the upper part of a brainpan. In the part of the skull made visible by the removal of this brainpan the brain can be seen white, bloodless, as in a corpse. The brain begins to move and takes the form of sea foam, from which a Venus is born. She climbs a pedestal and becomes the well-known Cnidian Venus without arms, which stands in the boudoir of an American millionaire. The boudoir is empty. The silk curtains of the canopied bed are thrown back. The bed makes the impression of having recently been left by the woman sleeping in it. The bed and pillow still bear the impress of the body. A negro enters the boudoir, takes a drinking vessel from the wash- stand, and holds it between the legs of the marble statue. The marble statue urinates. The negro drinks the urine and then be- takes himself to the bed of the multimillionaire woman and sticks his head under the cover. He is surprised by his mistress during this procedure, who inwardly is flattered, but outwardly plays the SADISM AND MASOCHISM stern mistress and attacks and stabs the negro with a hatpin. The negro submits passively to it all, sinks upon his knee. She stops suddenly in her attacks and begins to suck the gushing blood from the wounds upon the bared upper body of the negro. She again springs up : "Phew, the devil ! You stink She then drives him out and stands by her toilet table, still furiously excited. Her hus- band comes in and says: "What is the matter with the negro? He is bleeding ! He even has tooth marks on his flesh ! Have you perchance bitten him ? You are indeed a Megsera. Very well, you may do this with that disgusting fellow. But not with me. Such a perverse taste !" She: "You are a milksop! You are no man! Indeed, if you had such muscle, if you could do anything, it would be worth while to concern myself with you. I will have nothing to do with such a miserable creature as you. Keep quiet !" He : "Ah ! — that's the way the matter stands. Yes — you know — that in times past you have demanded too much of me. I would have let all this pass, too, which you have done with this fellow. But you have not dared, and I have not dared to make any such advances to you." Just consider that this fantasy was related in two minutes and that Mr. Lamda's entire day is filled with such fantasies ! More- over, this fantasy is one of the mild ones. Most of them are bloodthirsty, rioting in tortures and blood. . . . The fantasy begins with an open brainpan. A thought as it comes into being is presented to us in a functional image. That which has its origin in the brain, the brain-born thought, is Venus, the goddess of love, the wife as mistress and divinity, before whom the mortal must bow down. The negro is the dreamer himself. His black soul, his passions, the devil within, are rep- resented in this symbol. In him the man and the woman dispute over the evil spirit — the parapathy. The woman suppresses the illness and stabs it with a pin, sucks out its blood, and the man looks on. Then comes the distressing admission, "You are no man ! You are a milksop ; you have no muscle !" . . . That is his misery. He is a small weakly person. His delusion of greatness (compare in the dream the warehouse Gcrngross [gladly great] demands great deeds of him. The sadism is often the revenge of the weak, merely the appearance of greatness. Power supplants greatness; in fact, power is greatness. The woman who is slain by him must feel him as g^reat.^ ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY 393 Again that old motive: the wife who deceives her husband. The mother was unfaithful to his father with a dark man (the uncle was dark — the father blond). Thus we see from this fantasy how the various currents of the psyche strive among themselves and how the unconscious longs to do that which the negro did. But in his consciousness he can be only masochistic. In order to give expression to his sadism, in order to kill a woman, in order to be master, he has to take refuge in his seizure. The attack is equally important for him as the discharge of his homosexual tendencies. He has two kinds of attack : one in which he is a complete man and a criminal ; another in which the woman within him triumphs and he subjects himself to the man. For his urolagnia conceals his masochistic attitude toward thr man, particularly the father. Thus we learn from this analysis the same thing as from those which preceded : how the original con- ditions become reversed and how appearances may deceive also in the manifestations of the parapathy. He produces all sorts of gruesome memories. A dead cat which was found hacked to pieces behind the house ; the killing of fowls at home, at which he liked to look on ; the mangling of a goose by a savage dog ; the drowning of a young person, which he wit- nessed, but without participating. He attributes his illness to the petting lavished on him by his aunts. I have repeatedly called attention to the significance of illnesses in childhood, because they create the desire to be sick. The illnesses of brothers and sisters are also important, inasmuch as they are the source of envy and severe conflict. Lamda relates in this respect : At the age of six I had whooping cough and partly that the other children would not be infected, partly because my parents did not consider the country doctor skillful enough, I was taken to Vienna to my grandparents and aunts. During my illness I showed myself very selfish and headstrong. My grandmother and aunts bore all my ill humor with truly angelic patience, while my grandfather, on the contrary, protested that my female relatives were letting me tyrannize over them. It was at this time (my second sojourn in Vienna occurred a year later, when my younger brother was ill with scarlet fever) that my aunt read to me, pre- sumably to occupy me during my illness (an aunt who, I may SADISM AND MASOCHISM remark, was even then and is to-day hysterical) the tale of Hop- o'-My-Thumb or a tale of elves. The word "hop-o'-my-thumb" remains vividly in my memory even now ; I probably constructed for myself a feminine counterpart, a little female hop-o'-my- thumb! My fantasy was at that time very much engaged with this creature, and my thoughts ran riot with it. But I liked par- ticularly to dwell in imagination upon the substances excreted by the body. I can recall quite definitely that I did not at that time distinguish clearly between defecation and urination and thought of the excretion as a single act, perhaps carried out as in the bird ; that is, from a so-called cloaca. The form of the sub- stance excreted was in my conception something the form of bird dung, only more consistent, perhaps like the little heap from the earthworm, and without the specific odor of human or of bird excrement ; presumably, which is suggested by the sugar box which I thought of as the place of its deposit, sweet and pleasant. The sugar box in question was made of thick, blue-green glass. It was at that time my pet object, which is remarkable inasmuch as a childish fantasy would not otherwise be readily seized by such an object. At this period I was not only self-willed, but petty and pedantic, for, as Mamma has frequently remarked in later years, I am now the exact opposite of what I was earlier. No one dared move one of my possessions from its place when I was a child, and I would be thrown into a passion if I discovered the slightest disorder among my things. Now I am neither petty nor stingy nor envious of those better situated ; nothing is more objectionable to me than dogmatism and fanaticism ; and no one is more ready than I to acknowledge willingly another's superiority, indeed even with a certain respectful submission. We see here a trait of character which is seldom absent from the picture of the epileptic personality: the overemphasis of the sense of possession. These children have a strong consciousness of having things, will not share their toys with brother or sister. They envy the other children in the family or elsewhere all that is theirs. They would like to have everything. Later this peculi- arity often manifests itself in the overcompensation of generosity and lavishness. The obscurity that lies over his childhood begins to lighten. Details come more and more clearly to mind which at first seem quite unimportant, but on closer investigation reveal great sig- nificance. ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY 395 Childhood Memories Second or third year. I was standing in the evening as twilight was coming on with my brother in a passage at the side of our house and was looking toward the garden wall. Suddenly I noticed a head looking over the wall. I was very much fright- ened at this and called my brother's attention to it. My brother began to cry loudly, upon which my father appeared and punished me for having unnecessarily frightened my brother and led us both into the house. I felt the punishment as unjust, for I actually believed I had seen something which inspired me with great fear. A memory which is perhaps still older than the preceding : I was standing alone before the door of the house. In front of the house was only a small yard, inclosed on two sides by boards, which I should now consider one and one-half meters high. Suddenly some little pigs sprang over the fence at the right, first two or three and then a whole drove. I fled to my mother in terror, who was just then coming to the door. At the time when my parents were in the country, there was at that place a very attractive teacher. I still remember the fol- lowing conversation between my father and mother. Mamma: "Yes, but they will not stay there so long again." Papa: "The gate will simply be locked in the evening and that is all there is to it." I must have concluded from the words which preceded or followed that this dialogue referred to an evening party at which the teacher was also present, and I supposed at the time that the company had to be detained so long chiefly on account of the teacher. I was already in love with her (perhaps three years old) and could quite understand how this could happen. I still remember the following episode from my first year at school. We had a piece assigned us to read in which a brother and sister find themselves in a dark place, a cellar, I believe. The sister wants to take advantage of the darkness to steal, but her brother tells her that God sees everything even in the dark, and therefore she will be punished just the same. The sister is per- suaded by this brotherly warning not to steal. The teacher whom I have mentioned added gratuitously to this moral tale that the sister later gave the brother a little picture out of gratitude. I wondered how the teacher knew that, for there was nothing about it in the lesson book. 396 SADISM AND MASOCHISM I once had to "stay after school," I have forgotten for what reason. The teacher was all alone with me after all the pupils had gone; I was very angry and cried; instead of making my letters in orderly manner, I purposely made them badly or made ink spots; I believe that out of anger I could not even retain my urine. Now, as I look back, this seems to me an attempt to provoke the teacher to actual punishment. That is, the use of the rod was at that time still common, and whenever one of my schoolmates had a taste of it, there was almost a certain envy at work in me, which was however strongly suppressed. My sleep last night was again filled with school dreams, which I cannot recall. I dreamed toward morning that I was on a ship, where I was listening to a conversation between the pilot and captain, according to which the ship was in a very dangerous chan- nel and at any moment might strike upon a reef. One of the men said that nothing could be done; they would have to keep this course. The first memory shows plainly the character of a cover mem- ory. It contains the guilt and punishment. The head which ap- peared over the garden wall looked like a head chopped off. We know indeed that small children frequently manifest the impulse to cut off the heads of their brothers and sisters. The meaning of this memory is : I wanted to chop off the head of my younger brother, but I feared the punishment of the Heavenly Father. His relation to his brother is still as bad as can be. The brother did not amount to much and went to America. That was the best and the happiest time for Lamda. But two years ago the brother returned and took his place in the parents' home. Lamda's at- tacks have lasted for two years. His illness must be connected with the murderous purposes he nourishes toward his brother. He could not hate him so if he had not loved him. In fact, he recalls various scenes which all, characteristically, took place in the water-closet. A further determinant of the first cover memory is the fantasy of the mother's body. He hes with his brother in the mother's womb and there sees his father's head (glans?) appear. All per- sons who are dissatisfied with their life long to be back in the uterus. Lamda, too, belongs to those who would like to begin a new life. The second memory of the pigs may be a symbolization of a ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY 397 definite idea: the swinish (sinful) thoughts break in upon a pure innocent child. The memory permits us to conclude that he has experienced "swinishness" concerning his mother (the pigs spring over the wooden fence). The father seems to have reproached her severely (see the cover memory with the chamber pot, page 378). The episode with the pretty teacher shows us how closely chil- dren observe the smallest details. It was for Lamda an accepted fact that the father like himself was in love with the teacher. Every one must love her because she is so beautiful. The third memory has to do with God's punishment. God sees everything and punishes everything. Fear of being seen is peculiar to him in a marked degree. The fourth memory reveals to us an attitude of defiance to the charming teacher and the attempt to force her to blows by his naughtiness. The dream, however, shows the patient in conflict with him- self. He propounds to himself the question whether he is steer- ing the right course and answers himself that he could not do otherwise now; he will have to hold to this course. We recognize that his parapathy represents security against his criminal sexual instincts. Instead of blood he drinks urine. Yet, if he has thus expressed and transformed his sadistic impulses, why does he then need the epileptic seizures ? We learn from an association of the patient, which in discussing the seizures refers back to the brother's return and the fact that he had a great deal to do with the sisters. The brother was very musical and played duets with his sisters and also played the cello beautifully. The patient felt himself neglected and brooded upon revenge. But he had an infantile fixation upon the family and loved his sisters above all else in the world. He was jealous of all suitors and would have none of his friends come to the house. He liked to scuffle with his sisters, when he would throw them upon the bed and press them hard. He was very angry when I forbade this play. He considered it not at all sexual. He did have to admit that now and then in such romping he had erections, which the sisters could not help noticing in their intimate contact. The first seizure was on a New Year's night. He had gone out with some comrades, while the sisters had gone with the brother to the theater. The murderous impulses seem to have troubled him very much at this time as a consequence of the jealousy. His inner imperative cried : "Kill him." He put himself 398 SADISM AND MASOCHISM on the defensive at every turn. He came half drunk into a coffee- house wanting to read there for the second time an article on "Freedom of Will and Logic," which had interested him very much. The author denied freedom of will and pointed to man's instinctive actions. He could not find the article, so that he spent two hours searching in the coffeehouse and looking through all the journals. Finally he found it in a supplement to the Munch- ne allgemeine Zeitiing. He had given himself the command, "You shall not go to sleep until you have read the article." A senseless notion with displacement of affect. It should have been : "I will not go to sleep until I have killed my brother." He found it and went home. He feared the freedom of his will and yet had to commit the crime. He accomplished this in the dream. That night he had his first seizure, which was followed by a rather long amnesia, in which he was afraid of all officers of justice. Now the way was open and in the dream he could be Jack the Ripper. The attacks have continued for two years. They ap- peared in his twenty-sixth year. I saw him after a seizure. He heard tones, voices, phrases, which he "could," or rather "would," never repeat lest he should betray his secret. He only knew that in his attacks he gnashed his teeth frightfully, as if he were grinding up bones. His tongue was coated after a seizure, as if he had overeaten, and his abdomen distended, as if it would burst.^ His recollections show that the tale Little Red Riding-hood has made a great impression upon him, also the Wolf and the Seven Kids. He has always been greatly excited by stories of the de- vouring of little children or kids. His cannibalistic instincts break through in the attacks. Also in his urolagnistic seizures he eats earth and sand with the urine, when the crunching of the sand produces feelings of pleasure (Mother Earth!). The words that he remembers after the seizures are enigmatical and resist analytic interpretation, for he can bring no material for enlightenment upon them. He describes such a night in which a mild attack has taken place : Before a quarter to five in the morning I was half awake; noticed that I was grinding my teeth ; stopped therefore at once the gnashing of the teeth ; had further the vague feeling that I had previously had a vivid dream and felt that it was the same as, or very similar to, all the dreams which had gone before, the content of which I could not recall when I awoke. I had moreover the ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY 399 sensation as if I had had rather clear insight into my momentary physical condition (distended stomach and intestines) and as if I would have (at my disposal) some means (a psychic capacity?) with which to meet and change this condition, at which there floated before me the ideas "substitute" and certain numbers, like "tenfold" and "twofold." I then became fully awake, and it was still before a quarter to five ; I lay awake then about three-quarters of an hour and again fell asleep. The dream that followed was this : I had to go to the daughter of the porter of the Burgtheater to take a French lesson, where I met my older sister, who had an important communication to make to this daughter of the porter. She made her a long visit in doing this, so that my French lesson was spoiled. The further content of the dream, which was very vivid and in which my brother also played a part, has escaped me. Neither can I define more precisely my emotional relation to the young lady mentioned ; I believe, however, that it was a more self-confident one, based upon a certain feeling of security, than I have formerly manifested toward the female sex. The dream ends with the following fantasy: I was standing at the back of an automobile, which was uncov- ered ; two ladies were seated in the front and my brother was driv- ing the car. I was afraid that he could not guide the car and wanted to go forward to do it. At this moment, an awkward movement which I made threw my brother from the car. I did not know what to do ; the automobile rushed on with the greatest speed. My older sister screamed: "Where are you taking us?" I awoke with fright and violent beating of the heart. The expressions "substitute" and "tenfold" may be understood when we know that he is suffering because his brother has taken his place with the sisters. This New Year's Eve in which he experienced the first seizure was the first he had spent without his sisters. He has a modest supply of funds from his father. The brother has spent ten times as much in latter years through his journey to America. The younger sister appears in the dream as the daughter of the porter at the Burgtheater, the older one in her own form. The French lesson evidently refers to fellatio and cunnilingus. His feeling of inferiority has disappeared in the dream ; he has a great sense of assurance. But only for a short time. Then the automobile dream gives evidence of the fear of his instinctive impulses. He kills his brother and goes on with SADISM AND MASOCHISM the sisters. The two ladies are his sisters. He is afraid his brother will lead the sisters astray. The mother favors the brother ; she is a procuress. He could devour the brother out of rage. His hatred is revealed in dreams in which the brother and sisters are carrying a corpse or the brother is seriously ill or wounded; in further memories, which have to do chiefly with blood and dead bodies. Even as a child he could not eat the skin from the milk. He had and still has an unspeakable disgust of bits of such skin in his coffee or milk, which may even cause vomiting, because he thinks of the eating of human skin. He was for a time a vege- tarian. A very interesting report concerning last night : I had rather a bad night : flatulence, slight local headache in the left temple and restless, disturbed sleep; for a short time I was grinding my teeth. Dream fragments : I. Only very hazy recollection : I found myself alone in a room and was continually struggling to free myself from the disagree- able state of which I was obscurely aware in my dream. I went then to seek for more lonely rooms, whereby I discovered another room that till now had been entirely unknown to me. I no longer clearly recall my feelings on finding it, but I believe that they were certainly no more unpleasant than before. I notice that the first ("familiar") room, which I had left to seek for the "unfamiliar" one, is one that I do not know in my waking condition. II. Indistinct memory of a splitting of consciousness: perhaps as if I may have submitted the suffering part of my ego to some one, to you. Doctor, or to some one else (for treatment, to be taken away). (Morning dream.) There is joined to it a conversation be- tween my father and his caretaker, at which I am present. The man, who is divided into two persons, says, pointing with his pipe to his double: "So, Sir, he moves his bowels, but can't pass his water (the caretaker is a drinking man), and he will not live long." Finally (morning dream) I saw in my dream a squirrel lying down ; I tried to kill it with a stick but failed. Then I noticed that the squirrel lay still in a hole in the ground despite the failure of my blow, so I tried to spear it with the stick, which was likewise ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY 401 unsuccessful. Then suddenly the squirrel was directly in front of my face in an aggressive position; I caught it by the throat and tried to choke it, at which it stuck out a fairly long tongue. At this moment I awoke. The flight through the various rooms is very interesting. It denotes a seeking in his own heart and a hiding from me and from himself. There are still many chambers which are locked against his consciousness. . . . The caretaker is a symbol of death and announces the approach- ing death of his father, who has kidney disease. He will die of dropsy. . . . The last dream, however, gives expression to the conflict with the brother and the foe within, with the animal nature ; it is so characteristic that it needs no comment. The split- ting of the personality is clearly represented in all these dreams. Epileptics frequently reveal this doubling of their personality in their dreams. On the other hand, we find the motive of "two fathers" in new form. The next dream is of the very greatest significance, because it precedes an attack. It must be mentioned that he was alone in the house with the mother, since his brother and sisters had gone on a long trip into the mountains. He had not accompanied them be- cause he was afraid of having a seizure away from home, and because he could not keep pace with them. His dream reads : I dreamed that I recalled that my brother had coitus with the mother. At least I believe that it was a dream, for in the morn- ing I remembered that during the night I had said to myself : "Ah, that is another childhood memory ; you must at once make a note of it." But I did not note it down. Furthermore, the thought seems so horrible that if such a memory should have come when awake, it would have been associated with a much greater affect and would not have come to my recollection almost by accident in the morning. I clearly recall the other dreams of the night : I was with the singer, G.-S. We two were alone, she in neg- ligee; the couch was prepared; I embraced her, had an erection; then awoke and slept again. About a quarter of nine in the morning I awoke again, began to dress, and as I was about through with my toilet — I was just combing my hair before the mirror — I was seized with strong feeling of giddiness, numbness of the feet ; instinctively I hastened to my bed and fell there in a swoon." The fact that the hated brother was away on an excursion with SADISM AND MASOCHISM the sisters had thrown him into profound depression. He did not admit jealousy. But one thought dominated him : The energetic brother might do something with the sisters. Then the notion occurred: If the brother takes the sisters, I will take the mother for myself. For this reason he saw the brother in the dream having sexual relations with the mother. The impression was so vivid that he considered it a recollection. Now he could say to himself : ''What the brother may do, I may do also." The singer, Gutheil-Schoder, was very much admired by him. He saw her last in The Taming of the Shrew, in which she pleased him very much. The associations reveal that she is a mother imago, and that he had various fantasies which related to the mother. He was very silent the day before the seizure, avoided being with his mother, and did not speak a word to her. He was in a very painful, confused state of mind. The door to his mother's room always stands open on account of his seizures. She came during the attack to his bed. He had gone out naked without a shirt and to her door. Then he went back to bed and had a se- vere convulsion (the mother's account). After the attack he relived the year in which he had burned himself. The influence of the clerical training breaks through. He recalls all sorts of miracles of healing and wonderful things. He said also that he was grieved that his father was not religious, and he had many Masses read for the salvation of the father's soul. A clerical novel haunts his mind. Sadistic motives are mingled with religious hallucinations in his twilight state : He is Saint Sebastian ; he is Christ ; he has a crown of thorns. . . . He is born again and ascends to heaven. The next night wild dreams of war and carnage. He dreamed : Every one has to go to war. I am alone with my mother. She presses an electric button. I say: ''That is not the right one; you will make no connection there." I draw a longish electric bulb from my pocket and press it into my mother's hand. As she takes it in her hand, sparks spring from the bulb. I awake with a pollution. Next dream : I dreamed that I possessed a new method of thought and a new philosophy of the world. Strictly rationalistic and mechanistic. I thought of the Bible and the Gospels and wept for the lost Para- dise. ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY 403 The dreams are transparent. They reproduce the familiar incest motive and the rehgious inhibitions. He carried on all kinds of erotic play with his sisters in his child- hood. The next dream repeats such a scene, introducing a memory of this sort : I was in a railway coupe on my way to the Semmering (?). The name of the station where I alighted seemed to me so remark- able that I said to myself : "This station is really not upon the Semmering." There was also a cemetery near the station to which I was bound. Later I was in company with the younger sister, who had the idea of seating herself upon me with bared . . . , when the door of our room was opened and a woman surprised us. I had the feeling that this was not the first time I had been surprised by this woman in a similar situation. I also believed that I could discern from the woman's remarks that there would be a scandal if she should find us like this again. I had besides the feeling that during the events of the dream just given an atmosphere of dread, of a threatening, inevitable, and fearful catastrophe (railway collision, end of the world?) lay like a burden over the entire region. Associating with this dream, he remembered a play with his younger sister. He lay with her in bed and performed cunnilingus, when the mother came in. He was under the cover, and she could not really see anything. She only asked him: "What are you doing there ?" He answered, "We are playing hide." His mother bade him leave his sister's bed. Dim memories seek to arise, as if he had once surprised his mother at something forbidden. At that time his world came to an end. In one of his seizures he screamed : "I am burning ! I am in hell!" (related by the father). I saw him in the succeeding twi- light state. He was exactly in the state of a six-year-old boy and informed me that he was a martyr and was going to heaven. Soon after, he was Christ, spoke in child's language : "I have been talk- ing with *Dod' (God) ; He told me that I am saved. *Dod' is dweat and dood. The doctor is a pig. All people are pigs. They have to go to purgatory." (Again speaking like an adult) "I must enter once more into the earth — into the mother's body. There will I become blessed. Blessed, blessed art thou ! Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness's sake.'* SADISM AND MASOCHISM Is silent and makes sucking movements. I ask : "What are you sucking there?" "Him — the great one — the enemy — the Devil — the Lord." Suddenly he bites his teeth together and gnashes. "Now I have it." "What have you?" "The Devil's tail." The twilight state lasted three days. Plainly fantasy of the mother's womb. He castrates the father by biting while in the mother's body. Dreams in which he spies upon his sister's urination are fairly frequent. Much more improper situations appear, but he is usually disturbed at them. The inhibition is always symbolized in the dream by some disturber. I will not weary you with these dreams. Similarly, uterine fantasies manifest themselves in the most varied forms. He is in an iron foundry where a man sticks his hand into the molten metal, and there is a hissing and sputtering. He sits within the furnace quietly looking on. He is in a strange closet, where he can see everything and urine and filth pour over him. In another situation every member of the family is observed at the most intimate functions. In all his fantasies he is in the mother's body and is the small Hop-o'- My-Thumb of whom his aunt told him. Here he can answer the important question who is his father. As a child he manifested an extraordinary interest in preg- nancy. He has grotesque fantasies of pregnancy, which one would infer from his distended abdomen. A great loathing takes posses- sion of him in the presence of gravid women. He can never look at them. Yesterday he saw a pregnant woman in the Prater and experienced without any reason a violent anger toward her. "I believe that I was furious even as a child because I was going to have a rival. I have passed through such an experience five times at home, for there was one sister who died immediately after birth. I used to have all sorts of fantasies in which I cut open the abdomen of a pregnant woman. The thought of Caesarian section was always very exciting to me" (memories of tales in which the belly was cut open). Yesterday he visited a prostitute. It seemed to him that she was pregnant. She admitted it when he questioned her. There- upon he saw red before his eyes and made his escape. A seizure during the night. After the attack, total amnesia for the night ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY 405 and recent years. He speaks very rapidly and a great deal. He is again a child of about eight years. Passes through a number of childish scenes from this period. . . . Hears bells ringing and prays as he prayed when a child. Afterward the excitement slowly abates. He reveals enormous loathing, which manifests itself in complete loss of appetite. He can eat no meat. Gradually memory returns. He knows that he had the impulse to stab the prostitute and drink her blood. He should have liked most to bite her directly at the throat. Great improvement after this attack. No seizure for six months. The formerly fearful, intimidated person begins to have a better attitude; he manifests energy and joy in life. Gradual increase in potency. Appearance of orgasm with coitus. Heightening of all mental functions. Nothing more heard from him, for the patient has left Austria. The last letter announced that his childish urolagnistic acts have been long since overcome. The first thing that impresses us as we look back over this case is that though it is one of distinct masochism, of desire to serve, of idolatrous worship of woman, it reveals itself prima- rily as a sadism. Lamda is full of criminal instincts. He is really a cannibal ; urine is for him a substitute for blood, earth for flesh. He is a vampire who would like to suck the blood of others. He is religious and seeks in piety a protection against his passions. He now passes through all sadistic scenes in seizures, after which there is amnesia for the simple reason that he dares not know what is passing in him. The plainly infantile character of his illness reveals that the assumption of criminality in the child is a correct one. He is once more a child and again as unclean and cruel as a child. He is fixed upon his family in love and hate. The condition of his recov- ery was separation from his family. It is worthy of note that the seizures fulfill a variety of fan- tasies, which sometimes are combined. He has different types ©f attacks, the motives of which are blended. We will call at- tention to the most important: 1. He kills his brother. 2. He does violence to his mother. 3. He performs cunnilingus upon his sisters. 4o6 SADISM AND MASOCHISM 4. He is a pregnant woman and is overpowered. 5. He is a vampire and sucks blood. 6. He is a cannibal. 7. He experiences his death. 8. He experiences his birth. 9. He is a martyr and suffers death by fire. 10. He is Christ and ascends to heaven. 11. He is burned in hell. 12. He is in his mother's womb and bites off his father^s penis. 13. He cuts open the mother's abdomen while she is having intercourse with another man (uncle). 14. He is himself a chamber pot or a closet into which the excrement is discharged. In many seizures he realizes several of these fantasies. He kills his brother, rapes his mother, slays his father, is killed, and passes through the Last Judgment. The transition from masochistic action to the epileptic attack is an interesting feature of this case. The patient's strong intellect and the will, so rare in epileptics, to triumph over the illness, even though opposed by a strong will to be sick, were elements favorable to the prognosis. Cure was facilitated through the circumstance that the brother left home before he did and removed to Munich. The basic motive was the jealousy of his brother. It is curious that he later affirmed that he saw plainly before him the coitus scene between brother and mother and could not be- lieve that it was a matter of hallucination. But it seems that he had spied upon a coitus scene between uncle and mother — and that the brother-mother picture represents only a cover memory. Lamda withdrew from analysis before all the puzzling things in his case could be explained. He made a rapid recov- ery and took a position abroad in order to escape the dangerous environment and the probing of the analyst. XX RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT It is dangerous to have man see too well how he is like the beasts without revealing to him his grandeur. It is also danger- ous for him to see too much his grandeur without his baseness. It is still more dangerous to allow him to ignore the one or the other. But it is of great advantage to represent to him the one and the other. Man need not believe that he is equal to the beasts or the angels ; yet he should not be ignorant of the one nature or the other, but he should know the one and the other. Blaise Pascal. Let us turn back after all these sad clinical histories to our starting point. We have learned that sadomasochism is a com- plicated parapathy, which approaches the type of the obsessive parapathies. The most of our patients reveal obsessive symp- toms; indeed the paraphiliac act as such impresses us as an obsession, against the overpowering force of which the patient struggles in vain. In my article on obsessive parapathies ^ I propounded this thesis : Every obsession arises through repression of an idea un- acceptable to consciousness and through transference of the affect which has been set free to another apparently less painful idea. This thesis seems to be thoroughly demonstrated through my analyses. The new thing is the variety of determinants of the sadistic obsessions, as revealed particularly in the cases under "A Child Is Being Beaten." The actual meaning of the parapathy appears to be hidden and is first brought to conscious- ness through the analysis. The ''death clause," absent from no obsession, does not ap- pear openly in the sadomasochistic paraphilia; it is manifested only as hate. But we must consider that every hatred in its final issue is deadly (Swoboda). The sadist strives originally for the total annihilation of the object. Every sadist is really a murderer. 407 4o8 SADISM AND MASOCHISM The sadomasochistic parapathy shares with the obsessive parapathy the compulsion to repetition, which is already known to us as the result of the repression.^ It is a question of an undischarged affect, the abreaction of which is attempted in the specific scene of the parapathy (Freud). To the compulsion for repetition corresponds the narrowing of the field of vision. The sadist suffers from a fixed idea in Janet's sense. His entire affective life groups itself about this one idea or about the single scene which expresses this fixed idea. The narrowing of the mental field of vision signifies there- fore a restriction of the afifectivity. The fixed idea is anchored in the family, in which the specific scene is enacted, even if the substitute objects of the present appear to have no relation to the family. In many cases the sadism may be traced back to the affective attitude toward a single member of the family. Frequently, the entire family is the secret harem of the sadist. All these sadists, in consequence of this fixation upon an infantile object, are incapable of love; that is, they are in- capable of a psychic love and in most cases impotent. Where there is potency, the proper orgasm is lacking. The highest pleasure is always attained through an autoerotic act; which means, with the aid of the imagined specific scene. The fixation upon an incestuous object is unconscious and disguised through inversion and displacement. We are able to observe in all these cases the phenomenon of pathological loyalty. Sadists are persons who have other- wise in life the peculiarity of not forgetting. Their thinking is autistic (Bleuler). The attitude toward the loved object is always bipolar, whereby one current seems to be completely repressed. They usually love the object of childhood, while the hate component is split off and displaced upon an indifferent object of the present. This original bipolarity, that is, the coupling of love and hate, forms the basis of the sadomasochistic parapathy. This hatred directs itself partly without and partly within. It is not the entire personality that is hated, but a component of the trialism, man, woman, or child. The internal conflict is RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT then again projected externally and discharged in a symbol. The specific scene of the sadomasochist is to be understood merely as a figure, as a fiction, in which many infantile inci- dents are condensed to a single scene. This fiction is to be resolved like a dream or a cover memory, similarly to the ob- sessive actions of the obsessive parapathic. The sadomasochist has in common with the obsessive para- pathic his hatred as driving motive. Cruelty is the expression of this inextinguishable readiness to hate. The investigation of the sadomasochistic paraphilia is like a journey through the inferno of human brutalities. Our wandering through this kingdom of hell is ended. The question arises whether the persons described here are "ex- ceptions," who are distinguished from the rest of mankind through a particular savagery. It might be objected that I have sought out from my material a series of gross cases in order to lay bare through them the excesses of the sadistic disposition. This is not true. Every analyst knows what very great part sadism plays in the structure of every parapathy. We may affirm : Every parapathic is in a certain sense a sadomasochist. The cases presented, which I have selected from all levels of society, afford us a cross section of modern civilized humanity. The number of sadists is legion. A large portion have sub- limated their sadism and made it serviceable to culture; an- other part has made it individually and socially innocuous through a well-functioning repression; and a very small num- ber give expression to it in the form and manner here por- trayed. This smallest fraction must however not be despised. If I — one single analyst! — have succeeded in gathering together from all parts of the world so variegated a palette of sadistic colors, we are forced to the conclusion that countless numbers of such poor sufferers are roaming about in "this best of all possible worlds." I say "poor" sufferers, for my patients are all aware of their paraphilia and have consciously only one fervent longing, to free themselves from the compulsion of their disorder. Man is happy only when he is well and sound. Happiness is health, and health is happiness. To happiness belongs the con- 4IO SADISM AND MASOCHISM sciousness of being true to the demands of conscience. Our patients are tormented by an evil conscience. Conscience repre- sents the demands of civilization. The greater the polar ten- sion between ideal requirements and actual fulfillment, so much the more serious must we reckon the suffering. (I un- derstand here "suffering" in every sense.) We have indeed seen how unhappy these patients are, how grievously they struggle with their paraphilia, and how they are all consumed with desire for true love. The parapathic is a criminal without the courage to com- mit crime. He is ill of this division in his nature. He oscil- lates between good and evil. But he merely reveals the traits of a normal individual in a certain distortion. Satan is the caricature of God. One must be amazed, when one learns to know the inner na- ture of man, that the number of actual criminals is so small. Mankind has achieved mighty results in his evolution. The conflict with our primitive instincts and impulses goes on with- out ceasing. Our patients are victims of this struggle. They are the pioneers who perish along the way to exalted manhood, from which, to be sure, we are still separated by a long distance. We have had experience in the war and observed how thin is the veneer of civilization which changes primitive man into a man of culture. The craving for savagery is tremendous and still bursts forth at every opportunity.^ This barbarousness dominates not only the nations which stand upon a lower plane of civilization. It is found in the highest cultural peaks among the peoples just as it is at the deepest levels. I could furnish proof for all nations. I will mention only two examples : the Russians and the French, in which I stress the fact that these are not exceptions. The famous Russian writer, Maxim Gorki, makes the fol- lowing statement concerning the Russian people : He says in an article written by him, which has appeared recently in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche C our ant and which bears the significant title, "The Cruelty of the Muzhik" : *1 am con- vinced that cruelty is a characteristic mark of the Russian people. Just as the English, for example, have a character- istic feeling for humor, so have the Russian people a fondness RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 411 for torturing in cold blood, a desire to investigate to the utter- most limit human suffering and human pain and to put to the test the obstinate endurance of life's forces. One feels in Rus- sian barbarity a fiendish deliberation; there is, so to say, a searching out and selecting. This peculiarity cannot be ex- plained in words like psychic abnormality or sadism." This Russian cruelty has remained the same through the course of centuries. A chronicler from the beginning of the seventeenth century relates that in his day they proceeded to torture as follows : They shook powder into the victim's mouth and then lighted it. Other victims were stuffed with powder everywhere. They cut open women's breasts, dragged ropes through the open wounds and suspended them. And what happens today? Gorki brings some examples. In Siberia the peasants dig holes in the earth when they have captured soldiers of the Red Army. In these they bury the soldiers with the head downward so that the legs from below the knees stick above the ground. Then they fill in the holes and determine from the twitching of the legs which of the victims has the greatest resisting power and who dies last. The Transbaikalian Cos- sacks teach their children the art of splitting wood upon the backs of their prisoners. It may be that a prisoner is cut open on his back, a piece of his intestine torn out and nailed to the trunk of a tree or a telegraph pole. Then the unfortunate man is driven about the tree or the pole, and the tormentors look on while his intestines are wound about the tree or the pole. Captured officers are flayed alive from head to toe, pieces of skin in the form of epaulettes are cut from their shoulders, and instead of their stars nails are driven into their bodies. Who are the most cruel, the Reds or the Whites? They are prob- ably equally so, for they are Russians, says Gorki. What is the cause of this barbarousness ? One is readily tempted to seek it in alcohol, that demon from whose clutches there has been no legislative power strong enough, no penalty severe enough, and no effort toward enlightenment profound enough, to deliver the Russian people. No, says Gorki, it is not alcohol. It may be that alcohol has a deeper influence upon the mental life of the Russian peasant with his wretched nu- trition than upon other peoples who are accustomed to a richer 412 SADISM AND MASOCHISM and more varied diet, but the refinement of the tortures sug- gests that the cruelty of the Russian is a characteristic sys- tematically developed through countless generations in previous centuries and kept alive in every new generation through pre- cept and example. Hundreds of proverbs, the crystallization of the folk wisdom of the centuries, counsel the people to be genuinely savage and cruel. Gorki recounts some of these maxims common among the peasants: ''Strike your wife with the thick end, and then bend over her and listen. If she still breathes, she is pretending. She needs another beating," runs one of them. Another says: "The more you beat your wife, the better tastes your soup." Children, too, are zealously whipped. Beating in Russia is a favorite pastime. Who is beaten is of no consequence. ''Ha, life is glorious, but there is no one here whom one can whip," is a frequently heard, characteristic form of speech among the peasants. The muzhik believes that he can banish the sorrows of the world, naturally also his greatest trouble, want of land, with whipping, beating, killing. "I have," says Gorki, "questioned active participants in our civil war if they did not experience a certain constraint when they killed one another. Ah, there was not a word of that. 'The other fellow had a gun and I had one. We were therefore alike. It makes no difference. AVe will kill some people, and then there will be more room on the earth.' " One has to beat one's fellow man, according to the Russian's point of view, in order to get him to develop his power and energy to the utmost. One proverb says: "If you beat a Russian, he will at once be able to make a clock." Man must be forever beaten for "man is too lazy to work, but not too lazy to eat." The Russian hears this manner of speech from the cradle on; he grows up convinced of the truth of these sayings. The muzhik learns much hard truth from them; he is trained through them to consider his fellow men with distrust and to set himself against them with all his might. He particularly regards the cities as superfluous upon the face of the earth, attached as he is to the latter with a mystic love. I do not believe that the Russian peasant is more cruel than the peasants of other civilized nations. His reactions are per- RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT haps franker and less restrained. We discover the signs of refined cruelty in other civilized nations also. We will now take as an example of a cultured nation a de- scription of French barbarities. The French writer, Albert Londres, has published in the Petit Journal his notes upon the African penal colonies, where the military tribunals send their convicts. These records have now appeared in book form. The book bears the title : Dante n'avait rien vu [Dante Saw Nothing], by which is meant that the tortures that human beings have to endure in the internment camps, that the horrors to which the convicts are subjected at the hands of inhuman sergeants, that is, from inferior officers, surpass the horrors which Dante conceived and described in his Inferno. Besides, the people are not serious criminals ; most of them are young fellows, scarcely more than twenty, who perhaps once, slightly tipsy, have been impudent in barracks toward a superior or who have deserted. Very many of them come from the for- eign-legion service, which has been found unendurable, and have made the attempt in some way to escape from the service and the climate in which they would surely perish. In one camp Londres gets in touch with the convicts. With those who committed self -mutilation. There the convict Firmine had chopped off two fingers so that he could return to a comrade in the central camp. Another, Samson, had cut off two fingers — with a spoon, as they all do, when knives are forbidden — in order to escape the sergeant of the fatigue party. One of them had only two of his ten fingers left. He guarded these two like precious treasures, irreplaceable jewels, to be used in most extreme case. He would not part with these last means of defense until the day when things went unspeak- ably badly with the fatigue party. ^ Londres reports of another camp: A convict, Veron, came up to the captain who was accompanying Londres to make a complaint. He had been put into irons for two hours, a form of punishment that reminds one of the frightful tortures of the Middle Ages, and which is still used in Biribi. The hands, back to back, are fastened in a screwing apparatus. The feet, 414 SADISM AND MASOCHISM held by rings, lie upon the sharp edge of a stake. A weight does the rest. Frequently a rope also binds the two appa- ratuses together and the delinquent is then tied hand to foot, his body bent. While the ''simple" torture is contained in Book 57, the penal regulation for military institutions, this rope, this complication added to the punishment, is nowhere prescribed. Nevertheless, it is in use almost everywhere! This "being inclosed in irons," according to the regulation, is to be employed merely to ''quiet" those who are raging and never for more than a quarter of an hour. But Veron, who brought his complaint to the captain, was placed in the iron for two hours. The captain began an investigation on the spot. Veron had been caught as he was creeping from the tent with some other person's bedding. He also reproached a sergeant with being a thief and deserving five years himself. He was put in irons because he was in a fury. This was the adjutant's report. Veron admitted it all ; but he had been left in the irons two hours. His knuckles were severely injured by the iron. The adjutant said that after a quarter of an hour he had given the order to Sergeant D. to release the prisoner. The latter stated that instead of releasing him Sergeant D. had only bound him more tightly. The sergeant was brought. Londres had already heard his name a number of times — in connection with many an evil report. Thus this sergeant had once ordered a prisoner to lie on the floor. Fellow convicts were then compelled to use the face of the man stretched out there as a latrine ! The convicts are sold by the sergeants to contractors to work as slaves, for which labor they receive no compensation, though probably the sergeants do. For strenuous labor in a heat of fifty-two degrees, they receive no decent nourishment, often for weeks at a time nothing but dried vegetables and water warmed in the sun. It is not only the punishment itself which is so horrible. These lost souls are the prey of the in- human sadistic gratification of their bestial guardians. Thus Londres tells of the behavior of six sergeants, who have made for themselves a particularly bad name : The six sergeants every evening, when the wine begins to have its effect, visit their "favorites." Entertainment is soon RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 415 to be found. If any of those in arrest is not in irons, they play circus with him. Coat and shirt are pulled off and then he is sent round the yard with a hand cart like a circus horse. When the pusher of the cart trots by the sergeant whose favorite he is, he is struck over the back with a riding whip. A prisoner once dodged this harmless play, fell upon the cart, broke his shoulder blade. It was due to this fortunate break- ing of the bone that an investigation was made, which was, it is true, as always most difficult to carry through, but which for once, as an exception, ended with the dismissal of the sergeant. Another convict — Londres designates him as Num- ber 11,446 — who knew of this circus performance, defended himself, fell upon the sergeant, and attacked him in a raging fury. A cry, a whistle, eight Senegalese riflemen, and Num- ber 11,446 lay in irons. His nose and the soles of his feet were burned with red-hot coals by these six merry fellows. And a fork was thrust into his mouth to tear out his teeth ! With another who lay in irons these six poured water upon his face and sprinkled sugar over it, to provide a little pleasure for the gnats, as they said. The agony of the man lying there bound, tortured by a swarm of gnats, may be imagined ! They would often assemble convicts and members of the guard. They would choose one upon whose face all must spit in turn. Often more than spitting ! The guards would not always permit themselves to be used for such atrocities. But the convicts had to obey, good or bad. Or a convict was thrown into a thorn fence and tincture of iodine was poured over his open wounds. If he cried out, which was likely, a crown of thorns was woven for him and he was made to play the Christ. One convict was locked in this condition in a cell for seven days without a mouthful of water. The six sergeants visited him every evening. They asked him if he had not yet passed over. When he begged and entreated them for water they would tell him to pray to the Arabian God Moulana, who doubtless would let it rain. They then mocked him when in his despair he called upon Moulana. (Arbeifer-Zeitung, 1924, Number 226.) I could easily show from further examples of recent years, 4i6 SADISM AND MASOCHISM even indeed of the last few weeks, how powerfully the sadistic component of man is manifested in social movements. Ex- amples are odious. And what is the use? I would avoid making this work a collection of all possible brutalities and attain thereby just that from which I wish to refrain : afford- ing sadists new incentives. Nothing is more dangerous than reading. I come to one of the most important points in prophylaxis. ''Books cannot make one good or bad, but they can make one better or worse.'' I have seen a great many sadomasochists who were driven to their paraphilia through the suggestive power of a book. Of course the germ of the evil was already latent in them. The effect of a book depends upon the book and the reader. The reader must have a certain sensitivity for the scenes portrayed, if they are to rouse him. Very few physicians can form an idea of the abundance of this literature spread abroad through all the languages of the world. It has to do usually with scenes in which a child is beaten or ill-treated on the ground of its training, more rarely through downright cruelty. The writings in which masochistic occurrences are depicted are also distributed far and wide. There are certain book firms that handle this sort of material, which can be seen by a fleeting glimpse of their output. The works of Sacher-Masoch are always coming out in new edi- tions. They seem harmless in comparison with the production of sadomasochistic literature which I have leafed through for scientific purposes. I will guard myself from giving a list here. But one patient alone gave me one of about 150 different works. This list was incomplete, as I was able to convince myself. I have seen many foreign books that are really picture books of sadism under the guise of scientific interest; they might be called a school for sadism. Unfortunately, this accusation may also be made of the journals which occupy themselves too much with interesting criminal cases, publish brutal situations ; it is true, with a tone of indignation, but yet with an eye to the general interest in such matters. Murder trials take up a great deal of space, while those things that make for the progress of civilization are dismissed with a few dry fines RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 417 Theater and cinema may also under certain circumstances have a corrupting effect. We do observe progress, it is true, when we compare the brutahties of a Shakespeare drama with a modern play. The cruelties are now psychic rather than physical. Inhuman torture has given place to psychic torment. Drama is no longer to be reproached with physical suffering. Mental distress is more interesting to us than the barbarities of the Inquisition. Education toward cruelty begins, alas, in the schools ; it sets in in the tender age of childhood. The child has a tremendous desire for cruelty, which is abundantly satisfied through the variety of fairy tales. Struwelpeter, Max and Morits, and others are at bottom sadistic books. I do not know whether a revision of the tales is possible or necessary. At any rate, they should be administered only in small portions. It seems to give adults satisfaction to tell children cruel and gruesome stories. Their own sadism evidently forces them to be always picturing sadistic scenes. This is the secondary premium of sadists when they have to occupy themselves with children. The theme of the mistakes in education cannot be exhausted in this book. It can be merely indicated. I should like to bring one example which will call to our attention the influence of a child's tale : A patient reports the following facts : Case Number 57. When I was six or seven years old, I was playing with my older brother, who lay sick in bed. My mother's nurse called with her daughter, a girl from sixteen to seventeen years of age. The latter came in to us to give my brother a little of her company, and when she saw me she said to me: ''Death will come to you and cut open your belly, and take your intes- tines and wash them at the faucet outside !" I sat transfixed. When my mother called me and handed me a piece of money (I do not know for what) it fell from my hand; she spoke rather sharply, "Be careful !" and asked for a glass of water. As I was about to give it to her, it slipped from my hands ; then she slapped me, because she thought it was carelessness. When evening came I saw in the pattern of the wall paper, in every arabesque, a death head, many hundred ; and behind every door a skeleton was lying in 4i8 SADISM AND MASOCHISM wait for me. I screamed with fear, lost the sense of touch, speech, consciousness, and had to be waited upon hke an infant. This continued for six months ; I was with my grandmother during this time and she cared for me with understanding and patience. It seems to me that there was one bright moment in between — I see a table, a lamp burning upon it — I myself crouched upon a seat, taking a bitter medicine. And then the first clear impression: A moonlight night, in which the light broke through a milky-white pane ; I was probably afraid of it, for my grandmother took me upon her arm, carried me to the door, opened it, and said : "No, my child, do not be afraid; it is the kind moon; see how beautiful its light is." Thus I returned to consciousness, though I suffered many, many years from anxiety ; which caused me even as a young wife when my husband was away from home to telegraph him to come back, I could not stand the fear alone. Then I read your books and thought this fear has with me, too, its roots in child- hood ; I recalled the terrible period and was then freed except that now, after years, feelings of anxiety have appeared for a short time through a severe inner experience. That girl died soon after at the age of seventeen. One should refrain from telling children frightful stories even in fun or carrying out sadistically colored play. Fathers say to their children: ''I will saw out your stomach imitate the noise of the saw, and make sawing movements upon the child's abdomen. Others bite their hands and say, *'l will eat you up ! You taste so good." Or, *'You will now be dressed and nicely roasted." * One of my sadistic patients had the strange fantasy of dressing women with bread crumbs and roasting them in large pans, while they looked pleased and gratified with the process. Such a fantasy arises from a silly child's play. I need not emphasize the fact that children should be kept far from all cruel deeds. The evil practice of allowing children to look on while animals are slaughtered or operations are performed, letting them see the pictures in illustrated papers which represent brutal scenes, often has a devastating effect upon the delicate child mind — as we have seen from a large number of examples. Parents leave newspapers lying around and the children seize upon them eagerly. In them are detailed descriptions of murders and abuse of children, which impress RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT themselves upon the sensitive brains and may form the starting point of a paraphilia. Fairy tales frequently are the nucleus of a sadomasochistic fantasy. This fantasy may slumber in the brain (embryonic psychic cells!) and be reactivated through later reading. I could bring simply countless examples to prove this asser- tion. I will cite just one striking instance of the effect of reading, because it affords interest in another respect. Case Number 58. Mr. N. M., fifty years old, suffers from youth a severe paraphilia, the germ of which is to be sought in a sadistic fantasy. He imagines women being impaled through the anus after refined tortures. His masturbatory fantasies always end with the scene of impalement, whereby in the moment when the pale is driven in the orgasm appears, together with the idea that the tortured woman falls in a swoon. The impalement takes place in groups. The women, often mother and daughter at the same time, are first sexually excited and tortured. Torture with feathers is an ingenious form. The women stripped naked are tickled with fine feathers until they are almost dead. They are naturally bound and unable to defend themselves. A brutal negro rapes them. The daughter is deflowered before the mother's eyes. The mother is at the same time violated in the presence of the daughter by vagina and by anus. The patient has indulged in onanism since early childhood almost without restraint, often three or four times a night. He has never performed coitus, although he has been married more than twenty years. Intercourse with his wife consists in kisses and play, in which for a long time he was afraid to touch the vagina. He was analyzed three years by Freud and considered it a great advance that after the analysis he could look at the vagina and touch it. But his wife is still virgo intacta! He is exceedingly religious, attends church faithfully, and feels his fantasies as a grievous sin. Notwithstanding this piety, he is a Don Juan who very often de- ceives his wife. He enters into many relationships, in which there is never coitus. His erections are very strong, the penis well formed. He is very proud of this organ and often observes it with satisfaction before the mirror. But he dares not submit this valuable instrument to a feminine object. He hates and despises women, without being himself clearly conscious of this attitude. The hatred appears plainly only in his onanism fantasies. SADISM AND MASOCHISM He feels like a child, despite his fifty years. He is highly gifted, reveals even great talent as a writer, has published several dis- tinguished works, manages a bank with great energy and force- fulness, and discloses besides a marked infantilism, in which the narcissistic component comes particularly to light. While in the analysis by Freud the CEdipus complex was dis- cussed as the responsible factor, it becomes manifest that he is pathologically fixed upon his father. He remarked that his father plainly favored the five sisters who succeeded him, among the six children, of whom he was the oldest. He hated the sisters and his mother and early harbored the wish to have a woman's place with the father. We then understand why the anus constitutes the central point of his erotic fantasies. The vagina seems to him ugly, moist, repellent, evil-smelling, while he attributes to the cleansed anus the qualities of a beautiful and pleasing organ. He also suffers from constant twitching in the anus, has to scratch him- self, introduce the finger, and so on. The impalement is a re- versal of a pederastic scene with the father. He is the woman and the father's penis impales him. He believes his fantasy is derived from a book which came into his hands by chance. It was a history of the world by Alvensleben, in which the im- paling of the Duchess Romilda is described. The leader of the Avars besieged the city Friuli, of which Romilda was the duchess. Romilda sent word to the leader through a messenger that she would surrender the city to him if he would marry her. He accepted the condition. The city was plundered ; the inhabitants in part slaughtered, in part taken prisoners. The duchess was per- mitted to sleep with the chief of the Avars for one night that he might keep his word. The next night she was delivered over to twelve subordinates, who gratified themselves upon her. The third day she was publicly impaled. The picture represented her sitting upon the pale. It was this picture which formed the starting point of the fan- tasies of impalement and was used for a long time as the sole masturbatory fantasy. The patient became then the king of the Avars, the women, his victims, changed and often were ranged in order, from ten to twenty. We know that such a series of objects often serves merely to represent one single object. This object was the mother. The patient remembers distinctly that once on a journey he cried out fearfully at night, stood up in his crib, and was punished for it by one of his parents. It is RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT very likely that he observed on this occasion coitus more bestiarum [in the manner of animals]. In characteristic fashion he is always introducing this situation into his coitus fantasies, which now and then appear. A second book was also fateful for him! An English book, The Way of a Man with a Maid, fell into his hands after Alvensleben's history. He calls this book his second great misfortune, for it added to the impaling scene the "torture with feathers." The content of the book is remarkable enough. A good-looking man lures women into his home. The women disrobe and are lightly bound. Then he begins to tickle them over the whole body with a fine heron feather until they faint away. Not until then does he perform coitus. The women are so thrilled by this treatment that they come again and again and even induce their friends to undergo the torture. These two books formed the nucleus of the fantasy, which was more and more elaborately developed through the reading of other literature of the kind. We succeeded in the analysis in demonstrating that similar ideas had already existed in childhood. He was often tickled until he cried out. He also stuck all sorts of things into the anus, in which manner he once wounded himself. Thus the fantasy of impale- ment goes back to an infantile experience, the tickling fantasy to the parents' foolish play. The two books mentioned reactivated the entire circle of ideas. It is particularly pictures which have a stimulating effect upon fantasy. It is very rarely that sadomasochistic books are not illustrated. Strange to say, censorship permits these works to pass unmolested, while sometimes difficulties are thrown into the way of scientific books or real works of art. We come to the important point of prophylaxis of sadomaso- chistic diseases. We may indicate two sources — school and the family. Punishment by whipping proves the best method for the development of sadomasochism. Fortunately, flogging is forbidden by law in most countries. But, alas, many instruc- tors do not heed the law but are led on in part by their tem- perament, in part by sexual impulses. It is a lamentable fact that even to-day in Scottish schools the teacher has the right of chastisement and that the whip hangs upon the wall in every 422 SADISM AND MASOCHISM schoolroom as a threat and warning and as a symbol of the instructor's power. Such backward schools are still to be found in Hungary, too, where punishment by flogging was introduced officially and is carried out in all schools. If one considers what we have learned in this work, one may think what the outcome will be. . . . Servants and educators frequently take vengeance upon the children for the oppression to which they have to submit from the children's parents. Teachers are also often embittered and dissatisfied with their lot in society. It is well known that teachers, to whom the future of mankind is intrusted and who have an exceedingly difficult function to perform, belong to those most poorly paid. It is therefore a reasonable demand that instructors should be so situated socially and materially that they have no ground to abreact their bitterness upon inno- cent children. A characterological (perhaps even analytic) examination of the teacher will be a requirement of the future. At any rate, teachers should be instructed through analysts in regard to the true psychic nature of the child. They should certainly make themselves familiar with modern discoveries concerning the sexual life of children. ■ They should at least know thoroughly the dangers of flogging and of punishment in general. Flogging seems to be as old as mankind itself. Neverthe- less, the ancient Jews must have had a glimmering knowledge of its dangers. A rabbi told me of this wonderful saying from the Talmud: **He who strikes his children, trains them for sin !" The Chinese perceive the connection between home and the world when they say in a proverb : *'He who does not strike in his home, will not be struck outside his home." The Persians, too, recognize the training for masochism, as their proverb tells us : *'It is easy to strike any one who has once let himself be struck." How differently do the cruel statements of the Bible read! And even Luther says: *'He who spares the rod hates his own child ; but he who loves his child, flogs him often." Perhaps Luther is right, if he means sadistically col- ored sexual love. . . . Hermann Schickinger has given a sort of historical develop- ment of punishment by beating in a very stimulating article "Zur Geschichte der Priigelstrafe in der Erziehung" [''The RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 423 History of Flogging in Education"] {Arh.-Z., No. 267, 1924). I will extract some striking passages from his work: In very ancient times, in Greek as well as Roman places of assembly, we find punishment by flogging still considered a method of training thoroughly justified, indeed even necessary ; and Plato, that famous Greek thinker (born 427 B.C.), describes for us in the following words the method of education prevailing in Greek families : *Tf the child obeys — well and good ! If not, one sets his head straight, just as one sets up and guides a sapling, with threats and — blows !" Whipping is approved not only by Plato, but also by his pupil, the philosopher Aristotle, with a slight modification ; and the writer of comedies, Menandros, who lived about 300 B.C., speaks very drastically: **A person who has not been beaten, has not been trained !" It was in general a well-rooted belief among the Greeks that physical pain was the most fitting means for the building of character, and from this spirit may be explained the representations of the pedotribes or teachers of gymnastics, whom we find immortalized in pictures always with stick, rod, or scourge — the symbols of their "authority." This belief in the morally purifying force of bodily pain led also that branch of the Greek race, the Spartans, to those cruel scourgings of all the boys at the festival of Artemis Orthia, where at the altar of the goddess many a boy lost his life under the blows of the scourge. . . . The prevalence of punishment by blows is easier to compre- hend in Roman education, where it corresponds to the harsher character of the people, than among the Greeks with their finer feeling. Even the famous Roman poet Horace (born 65 B.C.) tells us still of the ill-treatment which he had to endure at the hands of his teacher, the grammarian Orbilius Pupillus, with a "mania for beating." The Roman poet Martial (born 40 A.D.) testifies that in consequence of the notorious maltreatment of children through rods and braided thongs, Roman teachers and educators did not enjoy a high reputation, that they met everywhere with hatred and scorn, especially from the youth. Martial dedicates these hardly flattering words to the whipping pedagogues of his time : Nothing in common with thee — thou monster of teaching, Creature whom lads and maidens alike hail only with hatred! Still is the night ; no crowing of cock yet disturbs it : When crash forth thy blows giving vent to thy raging anger! SADISM AND MASOCHISM Quintilian (born 35 A.D.) already saw in beating the source of sexual errors ("educational sadism"). In his famous Institutes of Oratory, he speaks as follows concerning whipping in educa- tion: '1 cannot at all approve when children are beaten, although it is so common a practice and is not condemned by Chrysippos (the philosopher). First, because it is odious and slavish and dishonoring at any age ; next, because any one who is so base that he could not be improved by suggestion will also be as insensible to blows as the lowest among slaves; finally, because such meas- ures are not necessary if the child is under constant supervision." Furthermore, *'that it cannot be stated, without blushing with shame, to what shameful orgies unworthy persons abuse the right to chastise, and to what at times the fear of these unfortunate children leads others. . . Another aspect of the problem of chastisement, the use of corporal punishment in instruction, is touched upon by an article entitled, "Concerning the Education of Children," which is ascribed to the historian and philosopher Plutarch (born 40 A.D.). We read there in a correct valuation of the importance of a pleasurable mood in the child as a whole in its relation to his mental work : "I believe that children should always be held to their studies by kindly persuasion and affec- tionate admonitions, in no case by means of blows and mistreat- ment. For beating trains only slavish natures, embitters the child, and destroys his joy in his tasks." All these evidences of a tendency toward education without corporal punishment which appeared at the close of antiquity disappeared again in the pedagogy of the Middle Ages. It was not until the beginning of modern times that the human rights of the child came once more to man's consciousness, ■and the first person to protest against the traditional method of hogging was the French writer and scholar Michel de Montaigne. His Essays, which appeared in 1580, contain among other things this criticism of conditions in French schools : "Our schools are veritable prisons for the youth shut up there; one hears in them nothing but the cries of children who are punished and of their teachers raging in anger. An unworthy and corruptive method! How much more fitting would be their school rooms decorated with flowers and cheerful green than with cruel rods !" These are noble words which Montaigne utters. Alas, they are still applicable, and many a teacher would do well to write them upon his heart. One will find in every profession a cer- RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT tain percentage of sadists among the whole number of persons. Why not among teachers ? Every position of power is used by weak individuals to gratify an intensive will to power, if this will to power is sexually toned. Flogging is connected with man's sadistic nature. The ob- scure sexual desire is rationalized. Very few parents and educators will admit that they have pleasure in it. One often hears the untrue statement : ''The whipping hurt me more than it did you !" These words merely reveal the masochistic feel- ing of oneself into the place of the victim and are to be con- sidered as the expression of the pleasure in pain. Parents and educators who beat the children intrusted to them commit a crime toward the children and toward the state, because it unfits the children for life. Only those freely trained are actually free. And we urgently need free men and women. If parents should not beat their children, how much more circumspect should stepparents be! We have often seen that children instinctively hate their stepparents, because they are jealous. It is indeed a great educational achievement to win the love of a stepchild. To the honor of humanity, I must admit that I have seen a great many such instances, and that the evil mother of the fairy tale (Snow White) is far more rare than one would a priori assume. On the contrary. Many a step- mother does harm through too great indulgence and tenderness when she strives to overcompensate the stepmother complex. Nevertheless, the next case shows us how far a stepfather's sadism may go. It is from the life of an artist: Case Number 59. V. was under the care of his mother and aunt until his eighth year. Then his mother married again, and at once there was jealousy and hatred between stepfather and son. The child was punished for the slightest fault, so that he had marks upon his body. When he was encountered laughing, the stepfather, who had forbidden him to laugh, laid him over a bench, the upper part of the body bent forward, the hinder part upward, and pushed with his heel on the child. He was sent to the country in the summer, the stepfather's brother going with him as tutor. If the boy forgot at night to place his slippers be- fore his bed, the covers were dragged off and he was beaten with a horsewhip. Half asleep he would stumble up terrified and 426 SADISM AND MASOCHISM stammer out a question as to what he had done. Then the uncle would ask: ''Where are your slippers?" — When at the age of thirteen he was unable three times to do a task, the uncle bade him undress, tied him to the bedpost, struck him with the whip, and had the daughters of the house defile past him. The boy, who wanted to creep out of sight, had deep wounds on his wrists where the ropes bound him. To be locked in the cellar or the garret without food was a light punishment. At school his teachers were charged to be "strict" with him; at that time he attended the "Piaristen school" in P., notorious for its high-handed methods. Whenever he had a bad report, the frightened child would wander all day through the streets, wishing he could take his life; but at the last moment, restrained by his love for his mother, he would return home. The mother could speak with the child only secretly in the night when the stepfather was asleep. Once his landlady wrote from Konigsberg where he attended a trade school (there was no question of his desire or fitness for a profession) and com- plained to the stepfather that the youth, now seventeen years old, was engaged in "lewd practices." The stepfather arrived unex- pectedly in Konigsberg, tiptoed into the room, where the young man sat absorbed in a book, gave him a frightful blow on the ear, and said, "That's just for greeting !" The lewdness consisted m this : He lived on the third floor in a narrow street and oppo- site on the ground floor was a sort of detention room where arrested prostitutes were lodged. The boy saw that it was dark below while light where he was, and he caught the light in a mirror and reflected it down to them. The girls laughed and made merry over it; he wanted nothing more. At twenty, after finishing his studies, he obtained a position in Trieste ; he had escaped his tormentors, but now he became aware of the com- pulsion of his hated profession. He had wanted since he was thirteen to become a painter. He quarreled with his stepfather and remained in secret relationship with his mother. The mother later brought about an external reconciliation, and he received the means for study : he was able to become a painter. I am convinced that this brutal stepfather lived in the belief that he had really filled the father's place and acted as a true pedagogue. If the victim of his hatred and of his sense of power is to-day a famous painter, he ascribes it to his bringing up. But he will never admit to himself that he is responsible for the fact that this artist is an absolutely broken man, in- capable of life. He is impotent, sufYers from anxiety, pro- RETROSPECT AND PROSPECl found depression, and total weakness of will. Hatred toward his stepfather conditions his entire life and is inextinguishable. The child in such cases hates even his mother, as we have discovered, because she does not sternly enough oppose the father and prevent the cruelty. Truly, we have no reason to mock at the Dark Ages. We are still deep in the childhood of humanity. Countless num- bers of children are the victims of unconscious sadistic cur- rents. The mistreatment of children forms the saddest chapter in the history of mankind. And especially reprehensible are those forms of abuse which are draped under the ethical mantle of ''pedagogy." Will it ever be better? Can we see the dawn of a new era? Will man ever cease systematically cultivating brutality and pleasure in brutality? We will hope; noteworthy signs are al- ready appearing. More recent pedagogical methods have broken with whip- ping and the system of punishment in general and are attempt- ing to educate the child through love. There are various move- ments and methods; unfortunately, also those which drive out the devil through Beelzebub, through homosexual relations be- tween teacher and pupil. It is certain that only love can educate, and that the pupil should at least look upon his teacher as a friend and not an enemy. But the ancient homosexual relations of the Greeks between instructor and student, which were able to achieve such brilliant results, can scarcely be transferred to modern times. Only sublimated homosexuality, a purely psychic relation between teacher and pupil, will attain the goal of the develop- ment of healthy individuals fitted for life. My friend A. E. Neill, the well-known English pedagogue and writer, author of a number of stimulating books from the life of the school and of the pupils has created a new system, in which the children may do what they wish. He has ob- tained remarkable results in individual cases. And yet it seems as if he had fallen from one extreme into another, for he starts with the thesis : The child is basically good and is made bad only through false training. 428 SADISM AND MASOCHISM We act upon other observed principles. The child is neither good nor bad ; he is beyond good and evil. He has the nature of a primitive being, who, it is true, is considered ''evil" from the standard of our civilization. He has to adapt himself to cul- ture and be good ; that is, sacrifice his egoistic strivings to social requirements. The child is able to do this only when he is trained to a community of feeling and when he learns to love society. But the child has to be guided to this. All education fails when the child is totally without guidance. The attempt has been made in many countries (for example, in America) to put the right of punishment upon the children. The punishment is determined by a council of the students. This system should have good results. But there is the danger that children will be more severe than adults. Such youthful courts of justice should be mixed ones consisting of teachers and students, so that all unnecessary severity may be avoided. One should always endeavor to avoid punishment wherever possible, and punishment need never be corporal. To be for- bidden participation in certain favorite games, perhaps to be excluded from the classes which the child likes and which interest him, would suffice. The ideal procedure would con- sist in convincing the child that his conduct is asocial and to in- trust to him the right of self-punishment. Repentance and frank confession of the wrong should be considered adequate penalty. This slight punishment, too, should be carried out only in case of relapse. In every instance, the analytically trained teacher should first seek to discover the deeper motives for the wrongdoing. In place of punishment appears wholesome enlightenment (for example, in kleptomaniac acts and other impulsive ac- tions). Always must there be search for the wounded pride, diminished sense of self, and the chief motive of all, jealousy. We have seen what an overwhelming role is played by jeal- ousy in the psychogenesis of sadomasochism. One cannot overestimate it. Everything should be excluded from the family circle that could justifiably excite jealousy. The mistake of partiality to certain children and of overindulgence, of holding them up as models to others, has been illustrated often enough in our case RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT histories. The love of parents and teachers must be impartially distributed. Envy and jealousy should be early combated. Children's reactions of defiance are usually the result of jealousy. If the parents are psychologically trained they v/i\\ recognize the jealousy and make the child conscious of it, so that he may overcome it. One has likewise to reckon with the phenomenon of unconscious jealousy, which leads to the most dangerous reaction formations. Weakly and sickly children are often coddled. This leads to jealousy of the healthy child toward the sick one, and it also sets an example of the advantage to be obtained from illness. Jealousy is the wellspring of hatred. The effects of jealousy are the ideas of putting some one out of the way and sadistic fantasies of revenge, which are repressed and form the nucleus of the masochistic feeling of inferiority. The sadistic and masochistic fantasies are then variations of these original fantasies of revenge. I cannot emphasize it often enough : All sadomasochists suffer a repetition compul- sion and are really always enacting the same scene. Their mental field of vision is limited through the affect. They see everything through the spectacles of infantile jealousy. They have never overcome their infantile attitudes. It is the task of analysis to discover these infantile objects of hate. But how much easier is the prophylaxis of the parapathies if the occa- sions for jealousy and revengeful fantasies, such as have been mentioned, are removed! Most important for the paraphilias discussed is the pro- phylaxis in the parental home. No word concerning this should be in vain : Corporal punishment in the family is entirely unnec- essary, dangerous, and should totally disappear as a means of discipline. We have seen in any number of examples how the sadism of the parents has abused the prerogative of parental power in order to satisfy the parents' own sadistic desires. Parents who strike their children, even if slapping them lightly, who train by threats, are bad disciplinarians. The true educator works by example ! It is really incredible that mankind has not yet learned that the entire system of punishment has thus far been a total fail- ure. Even punishment by death, which, alas, is not yet abol- SADISM AND MASOCHISM ished, and the horrible tortures that have been in existence have not diminished the number of crimes. The same thing is true for children. We must learn to train the child through love, without fixing it upon us forever through an excess of affection. These problems seem to be solved naturally in a happy mar- riage. If we look back upon the case histories, we see frightful pictures unrolled before us. The most of these patients were children of unhappy marriages. The unfortunate marriage conceals a twofold danger. On the one hand the parents, because of their own disappointment in love, may transfer upon the child their entire affection. (A notable example is found in Heinrich in the story of the striking of the hand, Case 23.) On the other hand the hatred may be projected upon the child. The children are the bond which makes it impossible to dissolve the marriage. The unconscious hatred works then as a motor discharging itself in a tendency to punish and in severity in training. The number of cases of ill-treatment of children which comes to the knowledge of the public seems to be increasing. The child is felt as a fetter in unhappy marriages. Parents who were themselves sternly treated and were beaten are likely to continue this system of education. (This is the curse of the evil deed, that it is constrained to go on bearing evil.) Some- times the child serves to recall a wrongdoing. The mother knows that it had another father, the father suspects it,^ and the child is made to feel it. Children born before marriage are often the object of a particular hatred. They have forced the father to marriage and remind the mother of her *Vrong." The hatred of the parents sows and reaps the hatred of the children. We have seen that children's hatred has still other sources. Children will not tolerate their parents' interference in theii sexual life. The forbidding of onanism and the punishment oi infantile sexual play readily produce an attitude of hatred in the child toward the parents and toward all society. The child's right to his sexuality, which is now recognized as always present and necessary to his development, is not yet RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 431 well established. But I have repeatedly had occasion to stress the principle that parents and educators would do well not to trouble themselves over the sexual life of the child if it does not exceed certain boundaries ; that is, if it does not transgress the canon of the normal. We must indeed make the same demand of the children. The sexual life of the parents is their private affair. Children are not to be the judges of their parents ! We know that the attitude of the child to its parents is a bipolar one. Love and hate, overvaluation and depreciation, at- traction and repulsion, identification and differentiation, go hand in hand. The very fact that every person, but especially the parapathic, constructs a family romance in which he is not the son of his father, under certain circumstances not even the son of his mother (a changeling!), reveals the effort to depreciate the parents and set a distance between them. The mother in this family romance is changed to a prostitute. The image of the mother vacillates between the two extremes : goddess and pros- titute. We have been able to determine in men the faithlessness of the mother and in women the Don Juan nature of the father as fundamental sources of the sadistic and masochistic attitudes. The establishment of this is of deepest significance in the psychogenesis of sadomasochism. The parents are despised and hated ; this hatred is split off and carried over to the entire sex; the sense of guilt and the overcompensation result in a deification of the originally dishonored incest object. The problem of sadomasochism is a problem of affectivity. We have seen that the excess of affect is able to transform pain to pleasure, inasmuch as the apperception of pain becomes lost and is felt simply as incitement. This riot of affect arises from repression of affect and from a sudden explosion of the choked affect masses. In this affective debauch the specific scene may then receive from the polyphony of fantasies an access of infantile forces through the appearance of the middle voices, without these middle voices coming into consciousness. The sadomasochist during the specific scene resembles a SADISM AND MASOCHISM drunken man or one under the influence of any other narcotic. The affect serves the same purpose as the narcotic substance, to prevent the original affect from becoming clearly conscious. I must make myself plain through an example. Let us sup- pose a masochist who humiliates himself before a prostitute, allows himself to be beaten and compelled to degrading services. At this moment the old affects break forth, with which the prostitute is identified with the mother. The unuttered re- proach would be : ''You are a prostitute !" At the same time there sounds a second voice: ''Nevertheless, I must love you! Nevertheless, I have desired you. Why do you give happiness to another and not to me? . . And likewise the opposite tendency controls : "You are my divinity. I would gladly submit to you. You may do with me what you will !" The sadomasochist, however, does not know that out of the object of the present he has made an object of the past. This transformation is made possible through the affect intoxication. All the conflicts and the bitter experiences through which the parapathic has passed in childhood; the great disillusionment that the most sacred of all has become the basest, that his be- lief in the infallibility of his parents has been destroyed; all these fantasies and facts which he had repressed return again in his affective frenzy.'^ The establishing of this fact, that a child may come to grief because of the unfaithfulness of his parents, that his life is shattered because his mother had an extramarital relationship,^ points a way to the prophylaxis of these parapathies. Parents unfortunately have no idea how early a child receives sexual impressions. I have never been a preacher of morals. The sexual life of the parents is their private affair. I know too well that mothers who stand high ethically may yield to a lover under the pressure of their sexual need. But I do beg of all parents to guard their children from all impressions which might poison their fantasies.® Physicians should work toward enlightenment in this respect and concern themselves about a mental hygiene for the nursery. The intercourse of the parents which is overheard (paraphiliac listening), scenes of strife, re- proaches for unfaithfulness made through jealousy, may lay the foundation of a sadomasochistic parapathy. RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 433 The mistaken training which makes gods of the parents avenges itself bitterly when the divine beings do not hold them- selves to the strict measure with which their footsteps are measured. Did parents from youth up show themselves human beings and judge their children from a human standpoint, they would not fall into the role of the hypocritical and undisciplined, assuming to themselves a part that does not accord with their true nature. An unhealthy environment makes unhealthy individuals ; in- heritance is least at fault. The paraphilias of sadomasochism are in no wise a con- genital fate ! We believe we have demonstrated that. They are a reaction to life and arise when hate is permitted to strike its roots early into the heart of the child. All children are in a certain sense sadists. Whether they remain so or adapt themselves to culture, environment and training are to decide. Sadomasochism is a life reaction. He who will survey the cases described in this book will soon perceive that there are persons who cannot advance in life, who remain stuck, in whom will and achievement never coincide. The candidate for medi- cine remains a student, Heinrich (A Hand Is Being Beaten) gives up his career as artist, the gifted analyst (Case Number 37) wanders restlessly about the world, loses his position as docent, finally perishes miserably. One might say in the familiar words : 'T have never seen one end happily. . . This never attaining a goal, this never accomplishing any- thing, has its origin in an attitude of defiance toward the parents and toward oneself. (The father shall not know the joy of seeing me an independently creative man, and I do not deserve to have my ambitious plans fulfilled.) Here the inner, concealed religiousness speaks its word of power. The ascetic tendency of sadomasochism is unmistakable. In this the sadomasochist very often resembles the type that I have de- scribed in discussing fetishism. I must constantly affirm that most analysts overlook or fail to evaluate adequately the significance of religious sentiment in the dynamism of the parapathies. Masochism never arises without participation of the religious forces. The sadist be- '434 SADISM AND MASOCHISM comes a masochist as the result of a deep religious sense of guilt, turning the original sadism against his own ego. One will find in all these cases an evident amalgamation of the specific scene with religious motives. Just as religion is permeated with sadistic motives (cannibalism, necrophilia, bloody sacrifices, and the like), so is the paraphilia quite as often combined with religious tendencies. I will mention only the epidemics of religious flagellation, the self-scourgings of the saints and the tortures of the martyrs, the vast number of cruel ideas which are instilled into the minds of children in the way of religious instruction. It is unnecessary to waste any words over this. A prophylaxis of religious sadism seems to me impossible with the fixed conservatism of the Church, a change in the tendency to produce an effect through fear and horror unlikely. The conception of hell, the idea of a merci- lessly punishing Judge, who lays a penalty for impulses which He himself has implanted, reveal in themselves an almost sadis- tic character in the conception of religion. I have said once before : It is our misfortune that we have either the religion of the past or of the future. We stand between the cruelty of the smoking animal sacrifice and the paradise of the love of one's neighbor and thus vacillate between hell and heaven with- out being able to find the religion of the present. Religion and family determine the fate of mankind! The family permits the ''poor soul to become guilty" — and religion plants the consciousness of his guilt in the sensitive heart. The first sins are the incest complex and hatred toward those nearest one. The relations to the incest complex were demonstrable in all cases. The paraphiliac man can and must renounce woman. The paraphiliac woman remains anaesthetic. Both have set them- selves an incestuous sexual goal, which is unattainable for them. Their obstinate defiance allows them to act according to the formula: I will either attain the infantile goal, or I will deny myself normal sexuality (the mother or no other woman). Only analysis can penetrate the family history. He who is content to listen to the patient's accounts, which emphasize and make much in the history of their childhood of those sadomaso- chistic features which are common to all children, will never RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 435 grasp these connections and will insist upon organic causes. The patients then become the victims of their physician ! And there are unfortunately many physicians who imagine that they can deliver a sadist from his illness through an operation. Such a case is given here briefly. Case Number 60. A twenty-four-year-old sadist told me that he did not know until his seventeenth year that he was ''perverse." Forel's book, The Sexual Problem, fell into his hands at that time. He knew after reading this book that he was "perverse," and in fact a sadist. He now immersed himself in works of this sort. Hirschfeld's Sexual Pathology led him to consider going to Berlin to consult Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld referred him to Rohleder. He turned in full confidence to the noted sexologist to hear there and to be persuaded also from his books that his was a "con- genital" disorder. Diligent reading of Rohleder's works con- firmed him in this idea. Finally, raying of the testicle with Ront- gen rays was recommended as the sole means of deliverance. The pubertal glands must in Steinach's sense be stimulated to greater activity. This treatment showed no results. Testicle implantation was then advised. The patient sought for months until he found a man who sacrificed his testicle for the sum of 25,000 gold marks. The celebrated surgeon Professor P. performed the operation. Half of the testicle was sutured in the inguinal region, the other in the scrotum. The patient awaited in vain the disappearance of his sadistic fantasies. The celebrated Professor P. wanted to per- form a second operation upon him. This time, too, he was ready to submit to the proposition. A friendly physician then advised himi to go to Vienna and visit me. The first statements revealed themselves as falsifications of memory. Analysis showed that the sadism had probably been elaborated in his seventeenth year, while he read Forel at fourteen. But up to his seventeenth year he was able to carry on his life and make good progress in school. It was not until later that he lost • his ability to live, gave up his studies, and had no particular suc- cess in anything. When he was about seventeen years old his father married a second wife. The patient's attitude toward the stepmother varied between love and hate. He confesses that he liked to exhibit him- self to her, once showed her a wound on his thigh in order to have her see his penis, which was in a state of erection. Besides, after 43^ SADISM AND MASOCHISM his mother's death he had an affair with the housekeeper. At eighteen he allowed himself to be flagellated by another house- keeper and flagellated her. Finally he admitted incestuous rela- tions with his sister. A homosexual-masochistic attitude toward the father came to light as the basis of his disorder, the father having often whipped him when he was a child. Many sadistic scenes were always copying a whipping incident with the father, to whom at that time he had sworn eternal vengeance. His whole life was determined by this tendency to revenge, which was strengthened by jealousy when the father remarried. He entered into the relation with the sister after the father's second marriage. He crept every night into her bed. She per- mitted him every form of caress (cunnilingus, and so on) except coitus, from which she defended herself in order to preserve her virginity. My predecessors had no suspicion of these conditions. The most important root of his sadistic fantasies proved to be the wish to rape the sister. He lives the whole day long in his fantasy world, in which his family has become his harem. He runs incessantly about the streets and seeks — the sister. His ability to work is completely lost through his daydreams. In short, the patient needs a psychic reeducation and will be completely cured at the end of the treatment. I will not go further into the details of the patient's history. We see plainly the influence of a book (Forel's) in his four- teenth year. The sadistic fantasies hitherto latent and sup- pressed are again reactivated. This experience is typical and repeats itself in his clinical history. We must consider that every one passes through a more-or- less marked sadistic period in his childhood. The reading of a book (often the greatest trauma) can like any other trauma mobilize the infantile attitude. I might give here just one such example which will show us how a late trauma may have a serious effect, if it creates a situation parallel to that of childhood. Case Number 6i. Mrs. N. V. suffered for ten years agoraphobia. Two analyses without result. In the third analysis carried on by me, it appeared that the agoraphobia had broken out in her seven- teenth year after her sister's father-in-law, a man of seventy-two, had made a sexual attack upon her. Analysis revealed an earlier RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT trauma with her father, with whom she had played in bed, whereby he became excited and his member erected. She played with it until an ejaculation took place. The father suffered afterward with severe agoraphobia and gastric parapathy. The trauma was repressed ; it was, so to say, encapsuled as an "embryonic psychic cell." The later experience first led to the thought that the father might repeat the old play. The reality coefficient of her father fantasy was equal to zero before this trauma. She had no suspi- cion that an old man could have sexual desire. After the trauma with the old man, the coefficient rose rapidly. If the old gentle- man, why not her father? Then the fear broke out as a protection against her own wish. We must seek out the nature of the fantasies and daydreams if we would understand this. We recognize the severity of a parapathy from the polar tension between the conscious and unconscious attitudes. The unconscious maintains certain fic- tions, while consciousness recognizes the impossibility of reali- zation of the fantasies. This is the extreme case. This extreme constellation leads to the paralogy, which is the only thing that can make the impossible possible. In the parapathy the fictions have a certain reality coefficient, which is usually very small : The sexual guiding line in the last case was : I shall be my father's beloved. She behaved in her childhood in accordance with this; and the father strengthened this fiction, for he gave her a ring which she logically regarded as an engagement ring. She grew older and had to learn to recognize that the fiction could not be realized. She began to make truce with reality. She sought a father substitute and fell in love at fourteen with the school director. It was ostensibly an ideal love with no demand for the fulfillment of desire. To her horror a friend informed her that her ideal had an affair with one of her schoolmates. There was a girl in her class who had to repeat a class twice because of defective intelligence, so that at seventeen she was still her fellow pupil. This girl (Anna) was pretty and well developed. She learned of this girl that the director, abusing his position, had made her his mistress. Anna related everything in detail to the friend of our patient. The friend could not come fast enough to tell our patient all about it. She learned the following details : The director had been a widower for six months. He had Anna 438 SADISM AND MASOCHISM come to his home under some pretext or other and carried on with her all sorts of sexual performances. (The director had to give up his position later, when the affair became noised abroad.) The patient was indignant and her love extinguished. But she was in a state of anxiety when alone at home with her father. Why? Because the reality coefficient of her fic- tion (you will be your father's beloved) rose with force. If a director, the highest authority in the school, plays with a pupil, a father can do it with his grown daughter, if he has already done it previously. She was however able to overcome these first anx- iety states. It was the trauma with the seventy-two-year-old man that permitted the reality coefficient to shoot upward again forci- bly. Now for the first time every means of self-defense had to be brought into action. Now she became seriously ill. A charac- teristic symptom was the desire for an operation. Three organs were prominent in her illness, liver, heart, and lungs. She urgently desired an operation for gall stones, although the diagnosis was more than doubtful. Besides, she suffered from difficulty in breathing and fear of suffocation. A determining childish trauma was revealed in the fairy tale Snow White, which she had read any number of times and had also seen at the theater. She identified herself with little Snow White. (As is known, the hunter cuts the liver, heart, and lungs from a young boar, which the cruel stepmother then devours.) The motive of little Snow White is repeated many times in her dreams. The mother became in her daydreams the evil stepmother. The fear of being buried alive (Little Snow White is apparently dead in a glass coffin) was the source of the respiratory difficulty. I will publish the analysis elsewhere and merely refer now to two motives : the significance of a cruel fairy tale as nucleus of a masochistic fantasy and the phenomenon of pain-pleasure. The patient complained all day long of pains and urged an operation. There was a great deal to be operated upon and she wanted to have it all done, gall bladder, umbilical hernia, which existed only in fantasy, a prolapse, which in no way called for interference. She longed for a surgeon because other doctors did not understand her and considered her pains as simply "nervous." The most important thing for her is the care of her illness. She has a nurse with her all the time, suffers much, seems to herself very interesting in her suffering, and talks of her illness all day long. This illness is felt as pleasurable. I cannot conclude my discussion of the sadomasochistic complex without mentioning RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT how strong the masochistic component is in many clinical pic- tures. We find this pleasure in pain appearing very clearly in hypochondria, because of the narcissistic attitude of the hypo- chondriac. I have repeatedly in the foregoing volumes (es- pecially in Volume I) called attention to the frequency with which pain serves to hide a secret pleasure and to give oppor- tunity for indulgence in a definite fantasy. Physicians unfor- tunately know too little of these facts. Every year I see a num- ber of patients in whom the most unbelievable operations have been undertaken, while analysis is able to determine the pres- ence of a parapathy in the center of which is the pleasure in pain. The pain conceals a secret delight and at the same time represents the voice of conscience (sel f -punishment !). The following case may serve as an illustration of these remarks : Case Number 62. Mr. I. G., from Roumania, thirty-two years old, strong, of healthy parentage. A brother eleven years older is healthy. He lost a sister ten years younger several years ago through a bad influenza. He has suffered since his sixteenth year of a very strange disease. Having gone to sleep, he is awakened after three hours at the most by a violent pain. The pain dis- appears as soon as he sits up. He then has to stay up for a while. Then he lies down again, when the same thing is repeated. On account of this disturbance of his sleep, he never has more than five or six hours a night. He recalls that he suffered in the same way when he left home at eighteen to study in Germany. To be sure, he does not know how long before this the condition may have existed. All medical art has been in vain. The internists have been able to find no cause. A surgeon advised an operation. The left kidney was exposed because a renal calculus was suspected. The operation was without result. Six months ago a second operation was undertaken. The Vienna Medical Clinic gave the following report of this : Alex. V. Koranyi, renal artery causing renal colic through com- pression of the ureter. For twelve years pains in the left kidney, but only in recumbent position, especially at night. Restriction of fluids delayed, increased drinking accelerated, their appearance; connection with the amount of diuresis spoke for intermittent hydronephrosis. By suspension of the ureter the obstruction ap- peared rather in the upright position; with formation of valve of ureter the altered bodily position exercised no influence. The 440 SADISM AND MASOCHISM obstruction must therefore be of such a nature that it changes its local relation toward the ureter with the physiological lordosis and with the disappearance of the same in lying down; for this reason there was thought of an abnormally situated renal artery crossing the ureter from the inner side, changing its position with the change in form of the spinal column. The operation (fecit C. V. Illyes), consisting of bisection and Hgature of the artery, confirmed the diagnosis. (M. KL, 1923, M. 11.) This operation also was without result. On the contrary, the pain even increased and as an ill result a pyelitis appeared, a remnant of which still exists. The reading of one of my books led the patient to think that it might be a case of parapathic dis- turbance. He decided to submit to analysis. I was able to determine in the first sitting the remarkable fact that he always awakens at night with an erection. His disorder dates from a time in which he shared a bed with his sister. They slept together from his fifteenth to his eighteenth year. He believes that nothing occurred. But he does remember masturbating while lying near the sister. He stroked his glans lightly so that she would not hear. He masturbates even to-day. Reluctantly, to be sure, because he has observed that after onanism the pain is worse. He was seduced to onanism by a schoolmate at the age of four- teen and has imagined only girls he knows while doing it. His first attempts at coitus in his twentieth year were failures. The ejaculation occurred at the moment when he touched the woman. Later he was able many times to perform a second coitus with good potency. Although in later years he had occasion to have frequent intercourse with a widow, he broke off the relationship because he was afraid of bringing the woman into ill repute. He is in this respect exceedingly moral, although he admits that he is not at all religious and was a complete atheist even at seventeen years. Later in Germany he became an adherent of monism. He even intended to translate Haeckel's works into Roumanian. His mother was very devout and was always entreating him to go to church. He had to take Communion after his second operation, according to a promise, that he might thank God for his recov- ery. He has, he says, never enjoyed petting. But he clings fondly to his mother. His father died three years ago. He often dis- puted with his father over religion in order to convince him that there was no God. He lay between his parents in the marital bed RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT until his seventh year. It is worthy of note that the pain ap- pears on the left side, and that his mother as well as his sister lay at his left. Both were very strict morally. This moral strictness has remained with him. Morality was trained in him, and for this reason he cannot bind himself to any relationship. He has also observed that the pain becomes stronger after coitus, which the doctors tried to explain to him as due to hyperaemia of the kidneys. His first dream reads : I wanted to enter a church. There were three dogs in front of me, which disturbed me. I wanted to drive them away so that I could get into the church; I could not do it so went in with the dogs. I was looking for my mother. A priest showed me where she was. I came up to her. She wanted to embrace me. I re- pulsed her because I was afraid she would crush my new clothes. My mother thought that was only an excuse. The dream reveals the evident relation of the religious complex to his parapathy. We see also the dogs as symbols of his pas- sions and notice that his mother plays a large part in his illness. He did in fact pass through a very religious period in his youth. He left his parental home very unwillingly and had all kinds of fantasies as to how he could manage to remain at home. He suffers tremendous excitement when in intercourse with a woman. He is afraid of being discovered. Particularly fear that his mother and brother may find it out. This fear creeps over him even in Germany, when he is several days' journey away from his family. He steals to his mistress like a thief, leaves his house by a roundabout way with collar turned up, hat down over his eyes. He behaves like a criminal who finds himself slinking along byways. The explanation is simple : he behaves as if he were going to his sister, as if he had had forbidden intercourse with her. He admits that he has at times dreamed of such an event, which leaves a fearful impression upon him. He seems to be indissolubly bound to his sister. He tells me that in his region curses are the order of the day in which sexual commerce with the mother and sister is charged or threatened. These curses became a matter of every day during the war. He could never utter them, and they also gave him a very disagree- able feeling. He speaks of a strange manner of sleeping. He has a remark- able cramp in his abdomen. He draws the abdomen in when he SADISM AND MASOCHISM goes to sleep and draws his feet up to the abdomen. His com- panions have often said to him that in his sleep he scarcely breathes, but looks like a dead person. It is a violent cramp of the diaphragm which takes place in his sleep. His bladder and bowels are likewise convulsively con- tracted. He wakens in pain and has to urinate. Although there is strong urinary desire, he can discharge but a few drops (at the most a teaspoonful). This cramp of the diaphragm seems to be the cause of a hyperaemia of the kidneys, which explains the twisted renal artery. What is the cause of this cramp of the diaphragm? I had an idea that there must be a memory picture of his onanism when he lay by his sister and masturbated. He admits that he always suppressed the dyspnoea which ap- peared with the orgasm after onanism through a forcible drawing in of the diaphragm, so that the sister would not notice his orgasm. Lying on his back is impossible. Severe pains appear at once. He always lies on his right side. It is the same position that he kept when he lay by the sister, who often complained that he left her no room. He stretched the nates forward ostensibly not to touch her at all, but in this way brought their nates closely to- gether. He tells me two characteristic dreams, which he had noted sev- eral days before the treatment began, at the advice of an ac- quaintance. I was in Roumania in an open bath out of doors. There were open cabinets for undressing; a woman had undressed near me, but I had no interest in her. I was waiting for some woman. I looked around several times and began to take ofif my clothes. I saw after a certain time that she was coming. It was my latest mistress. She came near and went away again. I did not know whether she had seen me. She was dressed in black and had flowers in her hand. I saw a man leading a dog by a leash. A second dog was joined to it sexually. They could not be separated. I asked myself how the man could be so shameless as to drag along two dogs in such a situation. I followed him as he went on. He came to a yard. So far as I could see, he tried then to separate the two dogs. There occurs to him with the first dream that he had once seen his sister naked in the moonlight. He went downstairs to uri- RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 443 nate and saw her entirely uncovered in the sultry summer night. He looked at her, then said to himself, "This is a sin !" — and care- fully covered her again. He thinks with the flowers that he often brought his sister flowers. Once he got them for her in the spring in very bad weather, which pleased her very much. The woman in black is perhaps the dead sister.i*' Bipolar tendencies (to see her and not to see her) are expressed in the dream. In the second dream he is the man who drags along a memory image : copulat- ing dogs. The picture shows him bound to his sister. The sister did not marry until late ; was thirty-one when, after much hesita- tion and delay in choosing, she married a widower at her father's bidding. The marriage was not happy. He describes the pain as passing from before backward, though originally it was more forward in the abdominal region (toward the pit of the stomach). He has been without pain for three days. Last night he again felt pain, but only in front in the abdomen. We know that the pains have always been connected with an erec- tion. The process is this : He awakens in the night, feels an in- tolerable pain, and at the same time has a painful erection. At the moment that he springs from his bed, changes the horizontal position to a vertical one, pain and erection disappear. It is now clear to him that he is haunted by sexual memory pictures, and that in his dreams he is plainly lying again by his sister. Every horizontal position rouses a sexual association. He affirms that only in two instances does he have better nights ! First, when he is out in company in the evening and talks upon any theme whatever in an interesting manner, whereby he is in an emo- tional state. Secondly, if he is in a strange house where there is no chamber pot, so that he cannot get up. (The closets in his part of the country are all out of doors.) In the first instance he is plainly diverted from his fixed idea. In the second, the idea of the "strange house" destroys the association father's house-sister. While formerly he could not lie on his back nor upon his left side (in this position his penis might have touched his sister), now he can do so without any trouble. I conclude from various remarks of his that there is a homosexual component and learn that in his eighteenth year he slept with a young fellow with whom he formerly had masturbated. He naturally asserts that nothing took place in bed. But he admits that all sorts of homosexual acts (even pederastic) occurred between fourteen and seventeen. The SADISM AND MASOCHISM youths also lay upon each other and imitated coitus. One boy thrust his penis against his abdomen, possibly just at the spot at which he experiences the most violent pains. A rather long pause occurs in the associations, then he says : "My relation to my brother is absolutely natural ; we were always shy in speaking of sexual things. This seems to be so much the more strange as I recently received a letter from my mother which made a great impression upon me. My mother thought that perhaps my chaste Hfe was the cause of my illness and advised me to marry soon. But I cannot marry, because in the first place I am impotent and in the second place I am of the opinion, or, better, I was of the opinion, that coitus would make my trouble worse." Explanations concerning homosexuality brought about a violent reaction. He again had a bad night and severe pains. The re- sistances increase and are reflected in two dreams. I go into church and remain standing somewhere behind. Some one calls to me to come nearer. As I go forward the priest comes, approaches us, and brings something in his hand (Holy Communion?). I have not fasted. But there were upon a platter meat and bread, and he said: "This is meat and bread from the region from which the boy comes." I have eaten ana think : *T must pay for this for it is a poor district and this is given to re- ceive alms." I feel in my pocket and find nothing. I come upon a street and see Dr. Stekel leaning on a wall and surrounded by people. I come nearer and want to tell something (dreams?). The crowd is muttering among themselves. A girl asks me: "Is that the well-known Dr. Stekel?" I say: "Yes." She asks : "Why do you relate everything ? They say in the city that he is too one-sided." I : "My dear young lady, that is not true; he is a psychologist and if he is also biased, that is necessary for new ideas." He had severe pain and a strong erection after the first dream. He sees in the first dream besides the priest a boy, whom he recog- nizes as a fugitive from Macedonia. He was a poor ragged boy. With this two traumata from his early years occur to him. He was five years old when he was enticed into a wood by older tat- tered boys. One boy performed pederasty upon him and com- pelled him to take the organ into his mouth. This boy often made fun of him later, so that he complained of him to his father with- out mentioning what had happened. He was lured into a storehouse by a man in his sixth year. The RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 445 man set him upon his lap and held him as in a vise. Then he attempted a pederastic act and spoke his sister's name. He screamed so that the man had to let him go. He often saw him later and hated him fiercely. When he masturbated near his sister he pressed upon his organ from behind so that the semen flowed off into the bladder. (This is a practice often made use of in his region by the wives to prevent impregnation.) He felt with this a pleasure, which was mingled with the pain. He was very religious until his fifteenth or sixteenth year. The first dream also refers to this. One passage in the Bible particu- larly made a lasting impression, the creation of Eve from Adam's rib. He miagincs that woman was cut out of the left rib. He once played theater in his childhood and took a girl's part. He must have looked like a real girl. The second dream expresses the resistance to the treatment. The girl resembles his sister. Different people have warned him against the analysis. One has to talk only of filthy things. We see clearly in the first dream that something has taken place with a boy for which he has not paid. He feels his guilt. It appears that he himself is the boy. Has his older brother done something to him ? Or do cannibalistic instincts hide behind the dream ? He brings no associations, so that we have no means of knowing. He feels the pressure now from both sides and remembers defi- nitely that the pain began originally as a dull sense of pressure. Besides, he always has a scaphoid hollow in his abdomen. He often drew men with such abdomens when he was a child and felt that this hollow was indecent. He had most severe pains once when the woman with whom he had a relationship lay upon him. He admits that this was the first time in his life that he had introduced the organ. The member was much too large and par- ticularly the glans so broad that he could never introduce it, how- ever many times he tried, despite the use, as he says, of vaseline. He has therefore a feeling of inferiority and believes he cannot marry. How could he deflower a narrowly built virgin ? He also complains of pain when the foreskin is retracted, be- cause there is then an unbearable tension in the member. He has erections only in the evening, when he is no longer at work, but the actually painful erections occur only at night. Sometimes an inexplicable feeling of anxiety overtakes him as SADISM AND MASOCHISM he goes to sleep, followed by a chill. He cannot give the cause. He brings the following dream : I am standing in a room with two comrades and my sister is present. The door is open and a wolf hound appears from with- out. My sister provokes the dog so far that it finally becomes so ugly that it is going to bite her. One of the men in the room is its owner and bids the dog be quiet. The dog draws back, but does not become entirely quiet and continues to growl. At last it does nothing, but I begin to find fault with my sister. ''What are you doing ? Do you not see that it is no dog, but almost a wolf ? Why do you irritate the animal? It could devour you." I am very much annoyed, my whole body trembles with anger because she has done this, and I see myself in a mirror or in my mind's eye and see my lean unshaved face. I think : "Now my whole treat- ment has gone to the devil." I awake from anger. Neither pain nor erection on waking. It slowly becomes clear to him that something has occurred be- tween him and the sister in sleep. Had she played with him and touched his penis ? Could he have attempted coitus and been suffering ever since with an evil conscience and a compulsion to repeat the attempt ? We hope that the further sessions will bring light. The first night without pain ! He awoke about four in the night and could not go to sleep again from excitement and joy. He had the following dream : I am in a harbor building with many compartments. I am there with a shoemaker who has worked with my uncle. He has an ox and wants to load the ox upon a ship. We wait for the ship and I go in advance out of the compartment. I see at this time that the ship has drawn near to the wharf. It begins to move away. I notice that the man will miss the ship and not be able to put his ox aboard. I run back to the room where he is. I run from room to room, a very complicated labyrinth. I cannot find him and awake in excitement. He has some more important things to tell me in the analysis. He will do it before the ship leaves the harbor. I suspect a flight reflex. And lo ! he suddenly surprises me with the information that he has to go away. He finds all sorts of rationalizations why he must take to flight. In regard to the shoemaker a characteristic scene from his child- RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT hood occurs to him (fourteen). He had a gymnastic apparatus and was showing the shoemaker's apprentice how the trapeze was used. The apprentice was afraid he would fall. He assured him and showed him a false hold. The apprentice tried the turn, fell so unluckily that he hurt himself and carried away a deep wound. He still bears a large scar on his face. This scar also represents a trauma of which the patient carries the mark yet to-day. He is seeking in the labyrinth of his mind for the traumatic event that he may find it before he leaves. He cannot impart it. To be sure, some other important memories appear. He sees before him a cellar in which he was locked. The only time in his life. His father had punished him for some misbehavior. What it was he does not remember. Then he recalls various scenes from his childhood. He played with boys and girls, looked at their genitals. Once his older brother surprised him, but did not reproach him. Then it sud- denly occurs to him that at a later age (nineteen to twenty-one) he was alone in a strange city with his mother and they shared the same room. Here the memory breaks off. The analysis stopped. The patient said he had to go home at once. He is now firmly convinced that his illness is only psychic in origin. But he will not recall certain events of his early years. He promises to come back soon. I doubt that he will. I believ(^ that he will not. He has good reason to run away. There arit evidently memories arising which will be very painful to him. He is satisfied with the results thus far. He is more than happy. He can sleep again and has no pain. It is interesting to consider this patient's reactions in relatiors to the analysis. I calculated upon eight to twelve weeks for the treatment. The patient could not agree to that. He had lost too much time with the operation. Could I not cure him in four weeks? I refused. Then he sent me different ones of his ac- quaintance, among others a girl who represented herself as his "betrothed." I was implored to make the attempt to cure him in four weeks. I should begin ; he would return in a short time. I yielded finally out of interest in the case. The result was that the patient broke off the treatment after two weeks because the pains had ceased and he could sleep. My warning against over- estimating the temporary success was not needed. He went home, felt very well at first. He wrote to his betrothed that she should come to him and le would marry her. She only could make him 448 SADISM AND MASOCHISM well. When the girl refused to undertake the journey upon the uncertainty, he wrote reproachful letters : it would be her fault if he was not entirely cured. He suffers severely from his pyelitis, while the disturbances of sleep have disappeared entirely. A few more remarks upon the case. It is interesting that the patient had consulted perhaps three dozen physicians. Not one of them had inquired whether he awoke from sleep with erections. Not one of them had any suspicion that this might be a case of sexual disturbance. I have still to add that the patient had never accomplished a complete coitus. He rationalizes this by saying that his glans is too large and that the women would suffer pain, since his penis, according to his statement, is very large. This does not accord with the description of his last affair. He had a mistress whom he often visited at night. He had then painful erections. But he thrust only the glans into the vagina and did not dare to press further. He rationalizes the visit at night by saying that his mother might learn of it. Yet he has to confess that his mother has written and recommended coitus. He imitates the procedure with the sister. We may conclude how far intercourse with his sister had gone. It seems to have been a matter merely of immission of the glans. The fear of the mother becomes thus comprehensible. If his mistress is a sister imago, the fear is that which he had when he carried on his prac- tices with the sister. It may be assumed that still more serious traumata have oc- curred. There is no sense in indulging in assumptions. His strange disturbance of sleep found complete explanation. The operation was unnecessary. That is perhaps the hghtest censure that one can utter in this case. We see from this case how important a knowledge of dis- turbances of sleep is for the analyst and the practicing physi- cian. Inquiry must be made in all similar disorders of sleep as to erection and urinary desire in men, as to urinary desire and moisture of the vagina (perhaps itching) in women. The internist should always think in such cases of a sexual dis- turbance. Surgeons, too, should occupy themselves more intensively with their patients' psychology. There are indeed many pa- RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 449 tients who are seeking for the pleasure of narcosis, of opera- tion, of subsequent treatment, and so on. A drastic example may be given. Case Number 63. Kartschikjan, S. J— Unnatural desire for operation as a manifestation of masochism (Nervenklinik, Prof. Astwazaturoflf). Mil.-med. Akad. St. Petersburg, Nontschnaja Medizyna, No. 9, 1922.— Abstr. Zthl. f. d. ges, Neurologie, 1923, Vol. 32, p. 122. Virgo, twenty-two years, who had undergone the following operations in the period from 191 1 to 1918: March i, 191 1 : open- ing of a pharyngeal abscess; March 2, 191 3, appendectomy; Octo- ber 3, 1913 : cholecystectomy and choledochotomy ; March 4, 1914: laparotomy (duodenolysis) ; June 5, 1914: opening of abscess on right foot; January 6, 1915: gastroenterostomy; October 7, 1915: extirpation of tumor of right hand; February 8, 1917: operation for periostitis of left foot; March 9, 1918: extirpation of a lipoma on the right leg; October 10, 19 18: laparotomy (adhesions); December 11, 1918: extirpation of the thyroid because of an in- significant goiter. The patient comes from a family with a bad neuropathic inheritance. Menses began in the fourteenth year. No sexual intercourse; no masturbation. No menstruation since February, 1918. Patient reveals evident signs of masculinism. Sex organs normal. No pathological nervous reflexes. Mentally the patient is more masculine in development. Tendency to abstract thinking. No ethical or intellectual defects. The patient's patho- logical psyche is revealed through some of her poems, which are dedicated to the operating surgeon and the essential content of which is best expressed in the strophe from Heine selected by the patient for the heading: "Rapture of torment and bliss of pain. The hurt and the joy alike unmeasured.'* It appears from the patient's confession that the desire for operation has a pathological basis; she simulated unendurable pain so that the surgeons treat- ing her would be moved to operate. The author explains the case, through analysis of the patient's admissions, as a totally conscious inclination for surgical operations manifesting itself in aggrava- tions and also in simulation of pain and other symptoms. The ground of this unnatural tendency lies in the inclination to passivity and desire for pain, as a result of sexual feeling — algolag- nia. The psychic symptoms and the anomaly of the physical organization (masculinism, absence of normal inclination for sex- ual intercourse) permit us to consider the case as a characteristic SADISM AND MASOCHISM manifestation of masochism. It is of practical significance that the physician may be easily misled by patients who suffer from this form of sexual psychopathy. We learn from this case that the operation vakes the place of a sexual act. I have had frequent opportunity to observe that the dream of narcosis represents a scene of sexual violence on the part of the operator. The situation is often one of a sadism directed within, the content of which is a brutal scene. It is interesting that Kartschikjan stresses the masculine char- acter of his patient. We see confirmed once again the con- nection of the sadomasochistic complex with homosexuality. Homosexuals want to be forced to heterosexuality through an act of violence. One best discovers these attitudes when one listens to the onanistic fantasies of one's patients. I have already drawn attention in Volume II to the fact that a collection of these fantasies would be a valuable work. The inexperienced person can scarcely form an idea of the wealth and bizarre character of these fantasies. A grotesque example which shows us the operation fantasy in association with the homosexual attitude is the following. Onanism fantasy of a sadomasochist : There was once a man who wanted fame at any price ; but since he was intelligent and cool-headed he first tested all his chances. He decided then to become a rich man by means of an entirely new erotic attraction. Distinguished by nature with a large snub nose. He took a kitchen knife and cut off his nose. After this he had made by a medical man an exact model of a vagina. Next he had the old nose scientifically cauterized and the spot enlarged cir- cularly. An artist then carved an exact vagina in it. Thus fitted out he went to a brothel and had coitus performed in this vagina. But inasmuch as the nose was quite high on the head, he had both legs removed directly beneath the hips so that his size was reduced one half. He was much better fitted now for coitus. This device was hailed in all Europe and America as a wonderful discovery. This fantasy helps us to understand another species, para- philiacs who long to be castrated. In such cases — they are not so rare — it is a matter of feminization by means of an opera- RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT tion. Certainly men who sell a testicle for a Steinach operation are in part parapathics, who in this way have a castration wish fulfilled. I could mention a large number of severe cases of parapathy which have been operated upon without sense and without re- sult. I will cite just one as illustration of the ''operative furor," published in the Journal de Psychologie (ig24, No. 7) in the Bulletin officiel de la Socicte de Psychiatrie de Paris under the title: ''The Problem of Surgical Interference in an Organic Disease with Hypochondriac Tendency." Laignel-Lavastine and Vmchon present a case and give the following anamnesis : Case Number 64. Mrs. M., thirty-eight years old, fell ill in January, 1916, that is, eight years ago, with gall-stone colic, which recurred twice in 1918. Shortly afterward a physician confirmed constipation and distension of the abdomen. This con- dition changed from day to day, according to whether she was more or less constipated. She described her condition : "One could believe a child might walk around in my abdomen." Further symptoms : headache and fear of insanity, fear of unmotivated impulsive actions. Since 191 7, for example, she had been afraid she would kill her child. This fear was precipitated through the portrayal of a similar case in the journals. Anxiety dreams at night, nightmare, attacks of obsessive laughing. Consultation of d number of physicians without result. In 1919 a doctor in Paris diagnosed chronic appendicitis. She was operated upon 191 9. Not a sign of improvement. Returning home (June, 1919), she was hardly able to perform her house- hold duties and seldom left her house. She was examined in October, 1919, by Rontgen ray and very carefully otherwise. She was told that she was suffering from intestinal intoxication (autointoxication) and that her condition would be incurable unless she would have an operation within two months. She refused at first to have one. The difficulty continued unchanged ; fresh examination gave a suspicion of abdominal tumor. She suffered alternately from constipation and diarrhea which appeared after meals. July, 1920, total colectomy was performed. No improvement. The next physician made a diagnosis of entero ptosis and ordered an abdominal binder. Another wanted to send her to Vichy for disorder of the liver. SADISM AND MASOCHISM Her material situation changed and she was obliged to work. She worked fifteen months at the sewing machine despite her pain. August, 1922, psychotherapy was attempted in a hospital, which at the beginning brought improvement. She soon came into con- flict with the house regulations, became sleepless, and after some weeks left the hospital, dissatisfied, in which Dr. Mignard had treated her. June, 1923, another sojourn of twenty-five days at the hospital. Treatment with adrenalin and opium. The treat- ment excited her. Crises appeared : attacks of rigor, heart palpi- tation, humming in the ears ; her condition grew worse from day to day. At the end of July, 1923, anxiety states, especially in the morn- ing after leaving her bed. Obsessive acts. She had to make the sign of the cross, although she no longer attends church — except on important feast days. "When her nerves give out" she is despondent, she feels the impulse to throw herself from the window, to attack people, to strike them. The feelings of anxiety arise from the stomach and give her the sensation of becoming insane. She came again to a clinic in 1923. She makes the impression of an old woman, has deep furrows in her face, which even in repose bears the expression of extreme suffering. She complains of buzzing in her ears, flashes before the eyes, headache (only by day!). Nightmares of gloomy content torment her. She is in a state of constant excitement by day. She is without will, thinks only of her illness, and occupies herself solely with her symptoms. She cannot bear the noise her son makes. He makes her head "split." She is afraid she might throw him from the window. Spots show in the Rontgen picture at the right of the vertebral column. Diagnosis : gall stones. The third operation is per- formed. Result : not a trace of gall stones. Her suffering is unchanged. She is worse at the hospital than at home, where her life seemed so unendurable that she begged to be admitted. She is in a dream the whole day; her head is empty ; she is negativistic and returns no answer. She knows, she is fully aware of it, she will never be well again. The slightest diversion lessens the pain, which she designates as an "inner hurt," as constant irritation. The pain now radiates to the left side toward the sigmoid flexure. An aperient, Hke belladonna treatment, at once brings on chills. The headaches appear especially in the morning, are some- RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 453 times located in the neck, sometimes at the top of the head, and often accompanied with nausea and feehngs of anxiety. The fear of doing something against her will (obsessive actions) persists. She never has any complaint against the physicians who operated upon her. A radioscopy reveals the presence of the stones already once discovered (dark spots!). After the last X-ray examination she refuses any further investigation. The condition is so much worse that such is also impossible. The two doctors are of the opinion that the pains and the hypochondriac ideas of the patient are organic in origin. Such pains are very frequent in dilatation of the caecum and the right colon. Colectomy was unsuccessful because other portions of the intestine had become distended under the influence of the consti- pation. The constipation was the result of vagotonia, which must alone be held responsible for the pains in the head. Both physicians question whether a new operation is not indi- cated and express the fear that it might have an unfavorable effect upon the patient. The "psychotherapist" Hartenberg advocates in the discussion that follows removal of the supposed renal calculi through surgery. Briand, too, is for operation. Finally the authors repeat the ques- tion: Operation or not? Hartenberg has no doubt of the answer and Delams summarizes the opinion of all in the words : The or- ganic disease forces us to the decision (L'etat organique emporte la decision). Every one of my pupils, even my colleagues who have merely read my Anxiety States without having tested it through ana- lytic experience, will at once recognize that this is a case of a severe parapathy expressing itself in physical symptoms (somatization). It seems to me doubtful whether renal calculi are actually present. In no case do they determine the clinical picture. The diagnosis of vagotonia and the derivation of the pains from an atonia of the large intestine reminds one of the student verse : ^'Things are dear for want of money. And we have no money for things are dear.'* It is astonishing that not a word is said of the patient's private life, her marriage, her mental conflicts. The picture of obsessive parapathy shines clearly through the symptoms (obsessive laughing, obsessive impulses, obsessive actions, furthermore feelings of anxiety). SADISM AND MASOCHISM It is emphasized that the woman with remarkable patience never complains of her operators. One observes plainly that an immanent sense of guilt urges her to operations. There is no doubt in my mind that another operation will make the condition considerably worse. The patient, who is completely introverted and lives in the hospital entirely in her daydreams, is a lost case. Psychotherapy should have been able to save her. But is an analysis possible in a hospital where the phe- nomena of transference and jealousy develop such insuperable obstacles ? What shall one say of the famous colectomy? And I am sorry to have to admit that I have seen similar cases even in Vienna. . . . I cannot unfortunately avoid speaking here upon the im- portant theme of ''the sadism of doctors." Doctors are only human. They are bipolar in love and hate toward mankind and to their patients. They are for the most part brilliant ex- amples of the sublimation of sadism and the ability to turn it to the service of humanity. Surgeons may have been originally sadists. They become through sublimation and overcompensa- tion the helpers of mankind, pledging their own lives to the saving of the stranger. This does not exclude the fact that in the polyphony of thought the voices of sadism remain present as the lower voices and have a significant word to say in diagnoses and indications. Is the delight in operating always the physician's joy in giving aid? What surgeon would be honorable enough to confess that operating is able to grant him a pleasure which stands very close to sexual pleasure? Naturally, what is said here does not pertain to all surgeons, rather to the exceptions. But some of them have assured me that there are certain operations in which they feel this pleasure. (I know a case in which even the suturing of a wound was accompanied by ejaculation. This surgeon later left the closing of the wound to his assistants.) It is striking also that many surgeons change their entire nature during operation. Kindly, friendly, gentle persons be- come harsh, scream at their assistants and nurses in gross fashion, to be transformed again after the operation into kind- hearted, socially controlled individuals. "Word sadism,'' which RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 455 I have had such frequent opportunity to observe among opera- tors, belongs here. The similarity with the word sadism during coitus is striking. Cursing, swearing, raging, proceed under strong affect, usually explained by the great excitement of the operator. I might state emphatically that I have observed this word sadism precisely with those surgeons who have a high mental standing, in persons whom I value greatly in every respect, and who maintain in life an exalted ethical standard. They evidently need this vent in order to express and abreact that portion of their sadism which has not yet undergone sublima- tion. Unfortunately the sadism of internists finds expression in pernicious form. I have a rich repertoire of patients who have been driven to despair through what their doctor has said. I will not cite too many examples. My colleagues will understand me. It is often very dangerous to tell the patient the truth (for example, ''You have heart disease and will live two years at the most !" — ''Your spinal cord is diseased and when the disorder reaches the brain you will become insane." — *'You have a gastric ulcer. If it ruptures, you are gone." These are only three examples from my experience.) The therapy, too, may be sadistically influenced. There are pre- scriptions and forms of treatment which are of decidedly sadistic nature (cf. Note 4, Volume I, Chapter II). I do not believe that it is a matter of conscious sadism. But the middle voices of sadism have their say in the unconscious and deter- mine the action. I think of my never-to-be-forgotten teacher Nothnagel, who was always repeating in his lectures : "Only a good man can be a good doctor." The ethics of the modern physician strives to justify this requirement. The physician can do this only when he is healthy. Nothnagel's words might be extended : "Only a healthy person can be good !" A large percentage of my analytic patients consists of physi- cians who are analyzed partly in order to be cured, partly in order to learn analysis. In many cases I have been able to enucleate the sadistic component. The patient then recognizes it and overcomes it. 456 SADISM AND MASOCHISM We thus come to demand that all physicians should have themselves analyzed; first, in order to learn to know analysis and make use in their practice of the knowledge which it brings, without actually being analysts ; " secondly, to conquer and sublimate their own sadism. It is precisely the sublimation of the sadistic component that leads to the higher levels of humanity. I have already men- tioned the fact that the philanthropists whom I have been able to analyze were originally sadists. We have spoken at length in Chapter VIII of the overcompensation of cruelty and its sublimation into compassion. I may go so far as to affirm that sadism has created the greatest works. It is a part of that force which always desires the evil and always achieves the good. I have referred also in ''Dreams of Artists," to the connec- tion between the instinct to destroy and the instinct to create and have demonstrated the hate component of the artist. ''Our virtues are the bastards of our vices,'* says Hebbel. The good doctor is developed from the sublimation of an evil one. It may be that a certain measure of cruelty is necessary for the surgeon, if he is to do in cold blood the cutting neces- sary to life. To be sure, this "professional sadism" manifested also by masseurs, orthopedists — and even analysts — must be purified of its sexual deposit. The patient confided to our care may not be debased to an object of our will to power and of our unconscious impulses. We physicians should have the ability to forget ourselves and feel ourselves into the patients' situation. Only the physi- cian who feels with his patient and suffers with him can be a good physician. Knowledge of analytic truths makes this feel- ing possible. It frees one from the infantile attitudes and withdraws the affective interest from one's own ego, directs and expends it upon the object. This is the great advance from asocial to social feeling which every true physician must make. I have already affirmed that there is also a cruelty in analysis. Psychic sadism may discharge itself here if self-knowledge and victory over self are wanting. The patient is fixed upon us through the transference; he is sexually in bondage. The temptation to exploit this bondage sadistically is too great for many an analyst to escape it.'' The physician then readily 9 RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 457 falls into the tone of the moraUst and forgets that it is his task to confirm and not to criticize. Our patients are not sado- masochists of their free will. They have become so. (Sado- masochisticus non nascitur, sed fit [the sadomasochist is not born, but made].) The question of guilt is ruled out of analy- sis. If the patient is released from his own sense of guilt, the anagogic tendency sets in of itself, when the infantile sources of hatred have been exhausted. He becomes social through the analysis, not through the moral preaching of the analyst. One often has the experience in the analysis that the patients are quite horrified when the middle voices and the counterpoint in the polyphony of thought are permitted to make themselves heard and to become conscious. "Am I really so bad?" they ask. The bringing of sadism into consciousness is especially a process accompanied by severe inner struggle and agitation. It is the analyst's duty to reveal to the patients that these are decomposition products of sadism, which prove that he has taken up the conflict against his primitive instincts. He has, to be sure, merely reached a temporary cessation of the fight through an unsuccessful repression. We see from this that repression is a normal cultural process ; in fact the very condi- tion of culture. But one must consider, decomposition products are no longer the original chemical body. They mean already disintegration and dissolution of the original complex body. Pathological pity, inability to look upon blood, fear of dead bodies and of graveyards, extreme vegetarianism, are sure signs to the analyst that sadistic impulses have been repressed. But the impulses no longer exist; they are in a state of de- composition. This gives an encouraging perspective and re- veals the anagogic tendency of the individual. The decomposition of a sadistic complex can be almost entirely accomplished. Then we have the so-called normal per- son before us. The parapathic has retained a portion of his original sadistic elements, because he has not entirely achieved their disintegration, but has inclosed them in protective walls. Yet he has barred them merely from consciousness. Re- sistances are erected against their becoming conscious. The original resistance is directed against the society that forbids the expression of the hate. If the individual accepts the social 458 SADISM AND MASOCHISM barriers, makes the law of another his own, the resistances turn again inwardly ; they block off the unconscious from conscious- ness. As we have already set forth, there arises then a great polar tension between consciousness and the unconscious. This tension manifests itself as parapathy and paraphilia, which mean a protest of the individual element against the whole. Analysis must lessen this tension. This is not to be understood that it grants permission for the living out of the instincts.^* On the contrary! It makes possible open victory over them. It leads to a verdict upon them instead of repression of them, as Freud has well expressed it. The cure of a sadomasochist is one of the most difficult tasks of the physician. The patient opposes the strongest resistances to our effort. We become to him a symbol of the hostile world, against which he has constructed the bulwark of his parapathy. We have seen what a complicated structure this paraphilia is. It discloses itself as a severe obsessive parapathy and represents an arrest in psychic development. The sadomasochist presents a form of ''psychosexual infantilism." He remains fixed in his childish experiences and in his infantile dreams. Investi- gation into his life history reveals beside his disposition (stronger instinctive life), mistakes in bringing up, traumata, and family constellations. The sadomasochist through a sort of compromise plays at the same time the part of the pious individual and of the sinner. This attitude corresponds to a revolt against society and its laws. Our patients are both paraphiliac and asocial. To cure them means to make them social. But this requires that their defiance be overcome. Sadomasochism is a parapathy of defiance. 'T am as I am! And it is your fault The defiant attitude is directed toward society. The problem is displaced by sadomasochists from the social to the sexual sphere, often also the converse. But it would be a mistake to consider sadomasochism an invention of modern civilized man. I have been making inquiry of Dr. Gaston Vor- berg. He writes me among other things : *T have repeatedly found sadistic and masochistic scenes upon antique gems and clay lamps. "Algolagnia was for the ancient Hindus the 'garnish of love.' (( (■ (( <( RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 459 "I will give you the following passage from my book, now out of prmt, Sanskritlehrhuch der Liehe Anangaranga, pages 143, 144 [Sanskrit Hexthook of Love Anangaranga] (six- teenth century) : 'Love play is a sort of struggle to which belong, besides caresses, blows and sitmachen}^ " The man administers four kinds of blows to the woman. He strikes with the outstretched hollow of his hand, with the back of the hand, with the fist, and with the flat hand.' " 'He uses the flat hand upon the sides and the pubic region, the hand closed in a fist upon the back, the hollowed hand on the head, the back of the hand on the heart. Tour blows on the part of the woman. 'Samtanika is the name given the blow which the woman gives the husband at their union in the region of his heart in sign of her displeasure. Tataka is a blow given by the wife with her flat hand dur- ing copulation. " 'Bindumala is a blow administered only with the thumb. " 'Kundala the ancient sages call a blow which the woman gives her lover with thumb and middle finger during the acme of the love ecstasy.' " Thus sadism has developed from normal love play. Its excesses are the hypertrophic growths of normal components. Inasmuch as conscience is ever more refined, the urgency to- ward sexuality ever stronger, and the homosexual component has to be sacrificed to the demands of culture, so must the reactions likewise prove ever stronger. The sadomasochistic neurosis is the sickness of an evil con- science. It seems strange at first glance that these illnesses are not known to consciousness, that religion has not overcome them. Their often absurd hatred toward religion, their ex- alted atheism, betray the overcompensation of an opposing cur- rent. I may mention the hatred of priests of a Marquis de Sade, whose portrayals of subtle cruelties and paraphilias alter- nate with tedious and wearisome tirades against the clergy. No one writes an Antichrist who is not secretly a believing Christian. Our patients behave like antichrists, but they pre- serve for the most part their chastity, they shrink from sexual 46o SADISM AND MASOCHISM intercourse, and mask their weakness through an external tech* nic of cruel aggression. Thus they afford a caricature of our disrupted times. Be- hind the mask of cuUure, the primitive attitude of hatred is concealed. But, likewise, behind the sadistic beast is hidden the anagogic tendency to overcome the beast. The inner struggle is projected outwardly. Hatred toward the family becomes hatred toward oneself, and hatred toward oneself rises into hatred directed toward the whole world. The paraphilias are projections of the internal laceration. A strong feeling of inferiority is characteristic of all these patients, arising from the endopsychic recognition of their own asocial natures. Many of our patients have been trained to a sense of inferiority, others acquire it through social preju- dices. I have already spoken of the sadism of the cripple. Here belongs also the sadism of illegitimate children, the sadism of the unfairly despised. (A beautiful example is the case of the vampire : Number 49.) Where society sows hatred, it reaps paraphilias. The best prophylaxis for these paraphilias lies, as I have already said, in education. What society needs is a campaign against envy and jealousy. If we reduce the different cases of sadomasochism which I have presented to one affect, we strike upon jealousy and the preparedness for jealousy. That individual is jealous who has not found satisfaction in love. Our patients are all incapable of love and consumed with desire for it. They transfer this condition to the entire world about them. They crave recognition and sympathy and act as if they had no desire for them. They are all ambitious, but too weak to carry out their ambitious plans for a great historical mission. Thus envy and jealousy drive them into the role of the revengeful person and the penitent one. They feel them- selves cheated of their desired happiness and allay their pain in the pleasure of the wrong they can do themselves and others. The compulsion of the external world creates an inner compul- sion. Every pressure produces a counterpressure. So long as this world is sick, there will be sick people. RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 461 Every step which we make toward freedom, inner and outer freedom, diminishes the number of parapathies. // society wants to have healthy members, it must first become healthy itself. How far we are from this ideal! Social epidemics, which manifested themselves so frightfully in the World War, are not exterminated. The torch of hatred still casts its lurid glow over this world and love to one's neighbor remains a fic- tion, for the fulfillment and realization of which only the noble- hearted long and dream. As in the Christian religion the sadis- tic component has found its way into the picture of suffering for all mankind under the cruel symbol of the Crucified, so our whole social life, together with its glorious progress, is under- mined with envy and hate. This social sadism, whatever it may be called and however it may be manifested, shows us what an enormous number of individual sadists there are. A grievous admission ! Every one should recognize first how deeply the primal reactions are rooted in him before he condemns a sick person who summarizes the unhappiness of his times in a sexual misdemeanor. The greatest group murderers are the state and society. When society shall once cease murdering and destroying, the morning sun of righteousness will arise upon poor and rich, the evil conditions of society will be removed; then also will all the paraphilias of cruelty vanish. For we keep before our eyes what we have learned in our long wandering through the inferno of these illnesses : Only the unhappy are cruel ! Man- kind has lost the art of being happy. Because parents and teachers are unhappy, they beat their children. Because we are harassed, we harass others. Because we suffer, we make others suffer. Diseases are the manifestation of their times. What could we expect after the great surge of hatred of the war? The reader can answer this himself: An enormous increase of all sadomasochistic paraphilias. The fight against these paraphilias must begin with a general warfare of all thinking men against hatred in every form. The watchword "Hate toward hatred!" would be futile. For hate ends no struggle ; it creates further hatred. The relig- 462 SADISM AND MASOCHISM ion of love toward one's neighbor has failed in its ideal task because it has combated with hatred those who believed differ- endy. Only love can attain victory over hatred ! Not until we understand hatred and unearth its deeper roots can we make it harmless. To know all is to forgive all. The hater must learn that his hate is a displacement from individual problems upon social ones ; he must recognize the pathological character of his asocial position and knowing it, overcome it. This mighty task, in which all religions have failed, analysis will some day accomplish. Freud once made the pessimistic statement that analysis after his death would dwindle to noth- ing because the world would not endure the truth. I am not so pessimistic. I believe that an analysis purified of all errors and dross will bring a new world philosophy. It will surely transform humanity and rend asunder the tissue of lies which now conceals man's true countenance. All of the world's unhappiness arises from lies. Our entire system of education and our conduct of life are reared upon deception. We are unable to bear the truth, because we have not been educated to the truth. Yet one thinks of a time in which the analytic truths will be- come the possession of all. Defects in education will disappear ; man will learn to know simply the one thing: how one may be happy and enjoy life without robbing one's neighbor of happiness and joy in life. Training to a sense of community, as given now in boys' societies, where the boys must do some kind act every day, must in the end lead to being good for the pleasure in being good and not from fear of punishment. The religion of the future will know nothing of hell and the Final Judgment. There is no doubt in my mind that hell is the projection of one's own unconscious upon the external world. As in Schiller's Diver the young man relates with horror the terrors of the deep, thus one shudders as one dis- cerns what is hidden in the depths of one's own bosom and transposes it to a world beyond, that there may be a distance between oneself and it. Hebbel rightly says: ''Man is like a basilisk; his blood congeals when he looks into his own face." Just as heaven is a projection of reward into the future, so hell signifies escape from deserved punishment. RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 463 Analysis will show us the way to overcome the fear upon which our civilization is built, and how man may construct a world of love in which there shall be but one penalty: remorse for having done wrong, and one atonement: the victory of good over eviL NOTES TO VOLUME TWO CHAPTER XI 1 "The spirits which I summoned, I'll never be rid of them." 2 Cf. the splendid romance Vice-versa by Angston, in which a son trans- forms himself into the father. 3 Used as the dramatic nucleus of the entire action in the well-known novel by Claude Tillier (Mon oncle Benjamin) [My Uncle Benjamin. Translated by A. S. Seltzer]. * In fact a very frequent means of precipitating an attack. ^ A suicide cleverly staged by the "Id." 6 In the first edition of Nervose Angstsust'dnde und ihre Behandlung [Conditions of Nervous Anxiety and Their States. Translated by Rosalie Gabler. London, 1923] 1908, I defined anxiety as the reaction of the life instinct to the advance of the death instinct (1908!). CHAPTER XII 1 This contract seemed to me so unusual that I questioned the patient's wife about it. She confirmed what her husband had said. She had entered into it out of love to him. 2 The following names were mentioned of girls with whom he had had sexual relations (usually two or three at the same time) and who were merely those of whom he spoke in the analysis : Marie I., Ilona, Helene, Irma, Frieda, Sophie, Jenny, Anny, Crete I, Crete II, Trud, Nelly, Marie II, Dolly. 3 An expression of the patient : "I am in raptures over a female vagina when it smells like old dried cod." * Dr. Stekel called attention in his lecture to the danger that hovers about an analyst in consequence of the patient's attitude of hatred. This atti- tude of hate is the result of a "rejected love" and leads sometimes to wide- spun plans for revenge, which may at last issue in a murderous attack. The dissolving of such an attitude is of the utmost importance. These in- tentions must be brought to the patient's knowledge as soon as they are recognized. He has to be psychically disarmed, after which the danger is usually over. The murder of the otherwise so experienced analyst, Hug- Helmuth, has fully confirmed my teacher's statements. CHAPTER XIII 1 Jesus Christ said, when his mother made a suggestion to him: "What have I to do with thee?" — A similar scene in Meyerbeer's Prophet. 2 Cf. my article "Der Wille zum Schlaf," J. F. Bergmann, 1915- ["The Will to Sleep," Dr. Stekel's Essays. The Critic and Guide Co.] 3 Cf. Vol. VII, the portrayal of such cases. *The desire for sexual love cannot be more clearly expressed. That is the way parapathics conceive the treatment. ^ This is very characteristic ! Those closely related are usually hidden behind these unknown and unseen faces, behind masks, disguises, etc. These 466 SADISM AND MASOCHISM are incest dreams. One may anticipate in this case, too, that the mother is here. The dream extends back to impressions from the child's earhest care. 6 Thus the feelings of guilt on account of incest, which he evidently commits in the dream, manifest themselves. He displaces these abnormal sensations upon somatic processes, while they are psychically conditioned and give expression to inner remorse and despair. 7 Primitive reaction. 8 Reactions of hatred. 9 Identification with the mother. 10 Desire for anilingus. 11 An obvious example what mischief is done with analysis. A man who is himself seriously parapathic undertakes an analysis after reading a few analytic books! One can readily conceive the result. When will parlor and lay analysis be forbidden by law? CHAPTER XIV 1 More concerning this theme in my memorial, Fortschrttte der Sexual- wisscnschaft und Psychanalyse, Vol. I. Verlag J. F. Deuticke, 1924. 2 Vol. V in the chapter "Grenzen, Gefahren und Missbrauche in der Psy- chanalyse" ["Limitations, Dangers, and Abuses in Psychoanalysis"]. 3 See the important chapter on jealousy in Vol. II, where the relation between jealousy and sadism is discussed in detail. *Vol. II. " M. K. was always surrounded by such parasites, who exploited him richly in every way (erotically and financially). ^ Cf. the chapter "We and Money," The Beloved Ego. ^ Cf. the chapter "Narcotomania" in Vol. VI. ^ I was collecting at that time the material of Vols. II-VIII, which were originally to have been a work in two volumes, Die psychischcn Storungen der Sexualf unction [Psychic Disturbances of the Sexual Function]. ^Storfer: Zur Sonderstellung des Vatermordes. Fine rechtsgeschict- liche und volkerpsychologische Studie. Schriften zur angewandtcn See- Irnkunde, XII. Leipzig and Vienna. Franz Deuticke. 191 1. [Special Po- sition of Parricide. A Study in the History of Jurisprudence and Ethno- psychology.] A parricide was cast into the sea, that he might not be united with Mother Earth. The dog and the cock, likewise the serpent and the monkey, have phallic significance. CHAPTER XV 1 Abbreviation for "feet," and at the same time transition to Mr. F. 2 "Zur Frage der Selbstblendung," Jahrbiicher fiir Psychiatrie und ^.Neurolgie. Vol. 41, Nos. 2 and 3. Franz Deuticke, Vienna, 1922. ^ ^Bulletin de medicine mentale de Belgique. 1887, cit. from Hartmann. CHAPTER XVI 1 The dream reveals also identification with a woman. He would like to bear a child. 2 Rosas were always dangerous for him. Three times a Rosa played a disastrous role in his life. s A sponge is used in ritual circumcision. *The motive "Christian- Jewess" appears here; it will find explanation later. 6 Regressive tendency. He is seeking an experience of the past. NOTES TO VOLUME TWO 467 CHAPTER XVII 1 Cf. the discussion of vampirism, Vol. V, Chap. 14. 2 Ernst Bircher, Bern. 3 1 leave to Dr. Hareven the responsibility for his novel process of reason- ing, in which, true to my principle, I have altered nothing. *The dream beautifully expresses the trisexuality : dog, cat, and kitten correspond to man, v^oman, and child. The child devours the masculinity. —Dr. W. St. _ 5 The key dream marvelously reveals her secret desires. She has married rich ; her material cares are at an end ; but she cannot love her husband, she loves one man only, her brother. She is the driver of the car. Where does her instinct lead her? Does it go to the right, to the normal, or left to incest? It forces her in both directions. She wants to go to the left (brother) ; another force turns her toward the right (prostitute complex). But the force that takes her to the right becomes gradually weaker. The power is first an automobile, then a horse, finally a little dog! Thus her passion fades away, becomes ever more feeble, so that she becomes the guide of her own life. She penetrates ever further into her unconscious ; she strengthens her introversion ; she is wedded in mystic fashion to her brother (communion — Lord's Supper — mingling of religious and sexual motives ; brothers Christ). At last she frees herself from the brother com- plex. She carries the man into the open ; she recognizes the identification with the brother; life lures and summons her; the sun smiles, men are working, and like Faust she cries : "The sun laughs — earth knows me again!"— Dr. W. St. 6 The boy is Amor, the fickle god of love, and at the same time a symbol of the brother. He has played with her heart and then carelessly let it fall to the floor so that it breaks in pieces. One discovers also that she saw something as a child which a boy showed her. ('T want him to show it to me.") This something is spherical in form. She could commit a necro- philiac act in order to see it. Furthermore, a recent disappointment in love comes into consideration, of which we shall soon hear. — Dr. W. St. ^ This obsessive love was a defiant love. She wanted to take revenge upon the brother and free herself from him. ^ This love should have overcome the family fixation. She chose her object so cleverly that she was able to arrange a great disappointment and an "unfortunate love." —Dr. W. St. 8 Two other dreams of the patient, briefly presented, speak in the same sense : Many birds are sitting upon a hill. Boys throw small stones, kill many of the birds, but they come again and again. My friend comes to me in a room ; with her comes her dog, which wants to bite me ; she drives it away, but it comes again and again. This dog which keeps coming back symbolizes her evil conscience. Natu- rally, the constant returning represents in another connection an ever-;n- sistent impulse. 9 The patient had lost one brother in the war ; the other brother was also an officer. 10 According to Stekel, the depression frequently breaks out after the marriage of a near relative, toward whom there have been incestuous desires. See Vol. II, chapter "Depression and Homosexuality." "The old method means the preanalytic period of this physician, who has been converted to an analyst through study of my works. ^ 12 Cf. the behavior of the pyromaniac in cemeteries and his afl'ect fol- 468 SADISM AND MASOCHISM lowing a dream of an overturned gravestone. Vol. VI, "The Analysis of a Pyrornaniac." r • i i 13 Connection also with analysis. Stock [stick] = btekel. 14 I am trying to get fuller data concerning this case. 15 One thinks involuntarily of Oscar Wilde'i' Salome, who also kisses the prophet's head. 16 This thought is strikingly expressed by the German-American poet, George Sylvester Viereck in his poem Slaves: No puppet master pulls the strings on high, Portioning our parts, the tinsel and the paint: A twisted nerve, a ganglion gone awry. Predestinates the sinner and the saint. Each, held more firmly than by hempen band. Slave of his entrails, struts across the scene : The malnutrition of some obscure gland Makes him a Ripper or the Nazarene. CHAPTER XVIII I Appeared first in Fortschritte der Sexualwissenschaft und Psychanalyse. J. F. Deuticke, 1924, Vol. I. ^ Zentralblatt fiir Psychoanalyse. Vol. I, Nos. 5, 6, 191 1. J. F. Bergmann, Wiesbaden. Incorporated in Conditions of Nervous Anxiety. Later incor- porated in Vol. I of Disorders of the Instincts and Emotions. 3 Die Epilcpsie. 1913. Alfred Holder. Vienna. 4 Referat iiber Epilepsie. Zcntralblatt fiir N ervenkrankheiten. 1912. sjelliffe and White, Diseases of the Nervous System, 1923 [Latest ed. ^929]. . ^ ^ Les epilepsies. Paris. Ernst Flammarion. 1922. "La patogenesi dell' epilessie cosi detta esenciale." Rassegna dei studi psichiatr. 1923. Vol. XV, Nos. 2, 3. ^ Bratz distinguishes affect epilepsy sharply from genuine epilepsy. In the former, attacks of petit mal are absent ; seizures are isolated, not periodically ; the illness does not proceed to dementia ; status epilepticus never appears. He has often observed attacks after anger, and they have also been precipitated by the sight of blood. ^The analytic works, naturally including mine, receive no mention at all in the comprehensive monograph by Redlich, Epilepsie, in Lewandowsky's Handbook (Julius Springer, 1923). 1^ Epilepsie und manisch-depressives Irresein. Berlin, 1922. S. Karger (with a very rich abstract of the literature, which I have used in part). II "A Personality Study of the Epileptic Constitution" (Amer. Jour. Med. Set., 1914). — "The Nature and Pathogenesis of Epilepsy" (New York Med. Jour., 1915). — "A Study of Certain Aspects of Epilepsy Com- pared with the Emotional Life and Impulsive Movements of the Infant" (Interstate Med. Jour., St. Louis, igis) .— 'Clinical Studies in Epilepsy*' (New York, 1917. Stechert & Co.)— "Treatment of the Epileptic" (Jour. Am. Med. Assoc., 1918). — A Further Study of Mental Content in Epilepsy (Utica State Hospital Press, 1918).— "Notes on the Prognostic Value of Psychometric Tests as Compared with Clinical Signs in Epilepsy" (Amer. Jour. Med. Sciences, 1918). — "Some Suggestions for More Accurate Men- tal Therapy in Epilepsy" (Jour. Am. Med. Assoc., 1818).— "Is Essential Epilepsy a Life Reaction Disorder?" (Amer. Jour, Ment. Set., 1919).— NOTES TO VOLUME TWO 469 "Remarks on the Therapeutics of Essential Epilepsy" (Boston Med. Jour, and Surg. 1920). — "A Consideration of the After-Care of Arrested Cases of Essential Epilepsy" (Avier. Jour. Med. Sci., 1920). — "The Sociological Training of Epileptics" (Neiv York Med. Jour., 1921). — "Some Emotional Reactions in Epileptics" (New^ York Med. Jour., 1921). — "Epileptoid or Fainting Attacks in Hypopituitism" (Am. Jour. Med. Sci., 1922). — "A Psycho-historical Study of the Epileptic Personality in the Genius" (Psyco- analytic Reviciv, 1922.) — "The Psychobiologic Concept of Essential Epi- lepsy" {Jour. Nerv. and Mcnt. Dis., 1923). 12 The affective respiratory convulsions of the child (rigidity) reveal the affective readiness and represent therefore a disposition to epileptic seizures. 13 Dostoevski was, as we know, a strong hater, vacillating between faith and unbelief. After every attack he felt guilty and ashamed as if he had committed some fearful crime. How well he recognizes the nature of his epilepsy when he says : "The dejection which follows in me the epileptic seizures has this characteristic : I feel like a great criminal ; it is as if an unknown wrong, a criminal deed were oppressing my conscience." Cited from Otto Hinrichsen, Zur Psychologic und Psychopathologie des Dichters, J. F. Bergmann. Wiesbaden, 191 1. i*Vol. V, Case No. 144, p. 464. 15 This pleasure premium explains for us the otherwise incomprehensible euphoria of these patients. They feel very well in their "suffering," which is in fact no suffering. Thus an epileptic girl of nineteen stated : "I leave myself to my mother's hands. I do not concern myself with my attacks." 1^ In the excellent story of Ossip Dymov, Der Knabe Wlass, Wlass suffers his first attack after a frightful humiliation. A similar scene in Dostoevski's Idiot. The sight of a knife in the presence of a hated person often precipitates a seizure. 1''' "Allgemeines uber den hysterischen Anfall." Zschr. f. Psychother. u. med. Psych., 1909. Sammlung kl. Schrift. Vol. V. 18 "Die Psychologic der epileptischen Ausnahmszustande." Zschr. f. N. u. P., 1923, Vol. 81. 19 Vol. V. [Disorders of the Instincts and Emotions] Storungen des Tricb-und Affektlebens. Urban & Schwarzenberg, Vienna— Berlin, 1922. 20 They, like Clark, distinguish potential epileptics, that is, epileptics with- out epileptic seizures, and promise themselves success from a psychoanalytic treatment of twelve to eighteen months. 21 This anaesthesia is just as frequent as a hypersesthesia of the skin. Many epileptics cannot bear the pressure of clothing, the friction of coarse underwear, whereby they express symbolically that they tolerate no com- pulsion and are hypersensitive. Anaesthesia and hypersesthesia often appear alternately. Or individual spots are anaesthetic and others^ hyperassthetic. The genitals particularly are easily hypersensitive ; they are irritated by the trousers ; sweat formation leads readily to eczema, etc. 22 Written communication. . tit 23 "Die Karotidenkompression bei Epilepsie und Hysterie. W. khn. Wochenschr., 1915. Neurolog. Zcntralbl., 1917. • . n- tj ^^Die Schnelldiagnostik zwischen Hysterie and Epilepsie tm telde. 28 "Psychopathic und chronische Encephalitis epidemica mit eigen- artiger Symptomatalogie (larvierte Onanie)," Arch. f. Psych, u. Nerv., Vol. 68, NoS. 3, 5, 1923. TT7 r ; 27"Uber larvierte Onanie im Kindesalter." Munch, m. Wochenschr., ^^28 Regres^ston may even go back to the father's body, as is shown by the interesting case of Dr. F. P. Miiller ("A Spermatozoa Phantasy of an Epileptic," Int. Jour. Psa., 1922, Vol. 3). The patient in delirium not only 470 SADISM AND MASOCHISM passes through birth, but returns to the fathers body as a spermatozoon and is once more cast out. I may repeat at this opportunity that the dis- covery of spermatozoa dreams should be attributed to me instead of to Silberer, as Silberer himself stresses in the article cited. But inasmuch as it is' forbidden to mention my name, my discoveries are always cited with the name of the first discoverer who succeeds me. My views obtain remarkable confirmation in Paul Schilder, "Zur Psy- chologie epileptischer Ausnahmszustande" {Zcitschr. f. Fsychiatne, Vol. 80). The close of the article is worthy of note, denying all that we have learned: "I must no longer expressly state that I consider epilepsy an 'organic disease.' At the same time, these investigations show again that we are justified in regarding such an 'organic disease' psychologically. We have come upon psychic mechanisms which resemble those which dominate in hysteria. From this we conclude that we have perhaps every reason to assume that hysteria has organic bases." I have to confess that I do not understand this sort of reasoning. It can >)e defended only if epilepsy must be absolutely an organic disorder. The statement should really be more carefully formulated and read: '1 consider hysteria a functional disorder. Inasmuch as I have found in epilepsy the same psychic mechanisms as in hysteria, the conclusion seems proper that in epilepsy, too, we may be dealing with a functional disease." 29 See Stortmgen des Trieb-tmd Affektlebens [Disorders of the Instincts and Emotions], Vols. V, VI, VII. 30 There is rich material in Krafift-Ebing regarding active procedure in epileptics. iHe tells us of an epileptic who wanted to do violence to his mother in his attack. This seems to be not a rare thing, for Arnt mentions that he has been able to observe a number of cases, also epileptics, whose fathers accused them of having intercourse with the mother. If the seizure does not take place with inhibition of motility, all restraints vanish. I find also in Krafft-Ebing reference to a second interesting case from Kowalew- sky. "W., no bad heredity, previously healthy, mentally normal before and after, moral, not a drinker, had on a certain day little desire for food. The next day in the presence of his wife and children he attacked a friend of his wife, implored first her and then his wife to grant him coitus. Re- pulsed, he suffered an epileptoid insult. In connection with it he raged about, destroyed things, poured boiling water over the person who approached him to seize him, threw one child into a stove. Then he became quiet, remained confused for several days, and came to himself with total amnesia for all that had happened." The ushering in of the attack with loss of appetite is worthy of remark. \ye shall often find it as an aura and forerunner of the seizure. It is the disgust which tries to prevent the breaking through of the sexual impulse. The_ most frequent aura which Graven and I were able to observe was a feeling of nausea. 31 It^ is very interesting that cured cases of epilepsy change in their transition to recovery into obsessive parapathies. The obsession appears then as the assurance against the criminal impulse. Thus Graven saw in one case a strong v^ashing compulsion appear after the seizures had ceased. 32 Could one believe it possible that difficulties were put in the way of the carrying out of my investigations? iMy intention is to analyze 100 cases with my fellov/ vvorkers in order to deepen our knowledge and to test the problem of curability through analysis upon a fairly large amount of ma- terial. I turned to Professor Karplus, head of the neurological division of the polyclinic in Vienna, with the request that he would permit me for free treatment incurable epileptics. The totally "organically" disposed gentleman, who considers himself a guardian of exalted science, refused brusquely, saying : "That would be like sending a deaf person to an oculist !" NOTES TO VOLUME TWO 471 Remember that I want to educate and cure the poor patients, and that bromide and luminal therapists have thus far not advanced one step in the solution of the problem of the therapy of epilepsy. 33 The case was referred to me by the director of a brass foundry, Mr Julius Kalmar. It was that of a highly qualified worker, whom he would have had to dismiss on account of his attacks. Inquiry before the conclusion of this writing brought the information that the man is completely well. 3*1 refer all physicians who are interested in this important question to the exhaustive work of Dr. Philip Graven "Die aktive analytische Behandlung der Epilepsie" in Fortschritte der Sexualwissenschaft und Psy- chanalyse (Vol. I. J. F. Deuticke, 1924). There are to be found profound analyses of ten epileptics. Furthermore, in the same volume the note- worthy analyses of Wittels, Heberer, and Sonnenschein. Heberer's case is interesting, for an epilepsy was cured after lasting for twenty-three years. ^ Wittels's case, remarkable because of the result, affords deep in- sight into the psychogenesis of an attack. The Vienese psychiatrists feel themselves in duty bound to defend the thesis of incurable organic epilepsy by calling into service all the tempera- ment that stands at their disposal. Raiman ("Zur Neurosenfrage," Wien. kl. W., No. 40, 1924) makes merry over my present work in the most trivial manner. _ He parades all his wisdom, reckons up all the organic diseases which might have psychic manifestations, a fact which I have never dis- puted. But imagine the unexampled effrontery: A non-academician, with- out title of docent or professor, dares to enter the sacred precincts of organic nervous diseases 1 The man must be rendered harmless and ridicu- lous. That seems to me the meaning of the criticism, which reveals a com- plete lack of understanding of the problems discussed. The works of Heberer, Wittels, Sonnenschein, Missriegler, are not mentioned at all, though clinical case histories are given in these instances. Raiman won- ders how the American Graven could get on intelligibly with his patients. That he could do it, his detailed case histories show. How was he able to do it? I have in a similar position analyzed in America in the English language and been able to achieve significant results. There are people who can enter very quickly into the spirit of a foreign tongue. But the psychic organs of speech seem to be wholly closed to Professor Raiman. When he recommends treating the sequelae of encephalitis lethargica by psychotherapy, we come at last upon a place where we can make a fresh start. Only, Professor Raiman should first take a course in psychotherapy with one of my pupils. Then, to be sure, his criticisms would read quite differently. Bleuler, in contrast to Raiman, expresses himself in the Milnch. med. Wochenschr. (Oct., 1924) as follows: "The most important of the seven- teen articles is the presentation of the psychoanalytic curability even of cases that appear serious, which up to the present time have been counted as epilepsy and have defied other forms of treatment. The perhaps two dozen cases which support this point of view are not to be coiisidered as exceptions, but almost all of them have some particular feature which gave indication of the psychogenesis. It seems to me that the differential diagnosis toward nonpsychogcnic epilepsy, the existence of which is not ruled out through these studies, ought not to be difficult. Though it is not easy on the whole to escape the convincing force of the cases cited, yet naturally objection might be made to many individual details." Thus speaks a leading psychiatrist, a thinker and investigator, who despite absorption in his specialty has preserved an understanding for the great psychological problems of the times. An old saying is confirmed anew: Nemo propheta in patria sua! [A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country!] SADISM AND MASOCHISM CHAPTER XIX 1 Typical experience of all epileptics. 2 This memory was later proved to be a cover memory. He observed 8 coitus of his mother with the uncle ( ?). 3 Sign of a fantasy of the mother's body. 4 In the father's body. 5 If one considers these splittings of the psyche in the dream improbable, let him read Spitteler's masterly work Imago. The hero separates himself into many components (stern mistress, knight, lion, rabbit, Konrad, and Viktor). Spitteler knows, too, that to love means to find one's divinity. Thus he says : "At the moment when Pseuda changed for him into Imago, she had to appear to him in a divine light. Viktor's love was born as re- ligion. And, oh, wonder of wonders I his goddess dwelt in nearness to him, visible and attainable." 6 Aerophagy. CHAPTER XX 1 "Zwangszustande, ihre psychischen Wurzeln und ihre Heilung," Med. Klinik, 19 10. Nos. 5-7. 2 See Vol. V, for what is said concerning the repetition compulsion, p. 29, and Vol. VI, English ed., Peculiarities of Behavior, Vol. I, p. 11. 3 An exhaustive presentation of the cruelty of civilized man is found in Wulffen's works, Der Sexualverhrecher and Das Weih ^ als Sexualver- brecher (Paul Langenscheidt, Berlin), a very full collection of material. Ivan Bloch also relates disquieting facts in Marquis de Sade und Seine Zeit. * An ill-behaved boy pushed me to-day while I was talking with his mother (jealousy!). The governess said to him: "The doctor will cut off your head!" The boy promptly rejoined: "And I will cut off his head, his hands, and his feet!" Later inquiry revealed that his father plays cut- ting off with him, especially cutting off the head. 5 Brilliantly represented in Gabriele D'Annunzio's romance Innocente. A father suspects that a child is not his and kills it by exposing it so that it catches cold. ® How far this canon extends, my readers know from the preceding volumes. See the affect debauch and the anxiety attack of a sadomasochist, p. 221. 8 A drama of Schonherr, Kindertragbdie, is typical of this conception. The children perish miserably because they learn that the mother has a lover. The writer passes over the important question as to what had driven the mother to take a lover. He sees only the mother's wrong and the supposed right of the children, but not the injustice of the children and the right of the mother to her own life. 9 Marcinowski mentions in his little book Probleme und Praxis der geschlechtlichen Aufkldrung (Anthropos-Verlag Prien. 1924), a little girl who had spied upon the parents' coitus and, quite horrified at the mother's heavy breathing, ran to her crying: "Muddie, are you dead?" ... It is well known that children who have witnessed coitus regard it as a sadistic scene (the father strikes the mother!). A three-year-old boy who was present at the coitus of his mother with her lover said to the man : "I will tell Father that you strike Mother when he is not home !" Comment seems unnecessary. 10 The sister in question died two years ago. ^1 The "slight analysis" in general practice is of the greatest significance; it prevents wrong diagnosis and makes possible insight into the psychic background of organic disorders. NOTES TO VOLUME TWO 473 "Eine vergletchcnde Untersuchuna der unbc7mtt,f^^ T„%kh.-^. i ■ D.hUrn. Verbrcchern uni Neuro.iW I KT^^rma^rt^^^badtr.: (c^'l^^yZ^r:!^^ disposition is becoming a harbor of safety for^ s^wreck^T ex stenS' Th^ f- '"' of these so-called analysts are added then to the »rr™™? V , """^^ There have appeared recently even advertising . ' "1 ''''''' »"^'ys"s. themselves to ?h'e naive publi? ari^stf ffe^ d Clt^^bkr "we tl: ,h''' PT^'h? ^^^f' '""^ encroachments. Every new mTveme^t has those who follow along, intellectual pushers, who make ufe of fh» opportunity that has arisen for material ends. But tWs ^?ofession of all others requires persons of high standing mentally and ethically °^ ^" ^n^s;:isT, Thf prrst ^T^::!z^st:^'d€S p-f J ---^i-iife? 3oVfn^ c^-g-;h:^^^:;£S: "^S"'"' M '"^^ the influence of analytic merature I S '^'7. ^"u"^^'-^^^ ^^'^ht time instead of reading Zaly tic books they would never have reached crime ««a*jnc .S-z/wiar/i.^n; the uttering of sobbing sounds by the woman as a siffn of passionate excitement.-So far Master Kalyanamalla. ^ THE END OTHER WORKS OF DR. STEKEL in the series Disorders of the Instincts and the Emotions are: FRIGIDITY IN WOMAN Two volumes £5.0.0 IMPOTENCE IN THE MALE Two volumes £5.0.0 PECULIARITIES OF BEHAVIOUR Two volumes £5.0.0 SEXUAL ABERRATIONS Two volumes £5.0.0 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS Two volumes £5.0.0 OTHER IMPORTANT WORKS ON PSYCHOLOGY GREAT EXPERIMENTS IN PSYCHOLOGY By HENRY E. GARRETT 42s. A HANDBOOK OF ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY By RICHARD NICE 42s. THE BOOK OF THE IT New Edition By GEORG GRODDECK 18s. THE WORLD OF MAN By GEORG GRODDECK 18s. EXPLORING THE UNCONSCIOUS By GEORG GRODDECK 12s. 6d. THE UNKNOWN SELF By GEORG GRODDECK 12s. 6d. VISION PRESS LIMITED Saxone House 74a Regent Street London, Wl VISION